


Familial

by TheBrilliantDarkness



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Children, F/M, Family, Gen, M/M, Original Character(s), Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-19
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-05 03:17:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 26,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1088969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBrilliantDarkness/pseuds/TheBrilliantDarkness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A birth in the family triggers some unexpected changes in Daken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is set several years on from present 616 - Laura's in her mid-twenties, to give you some idea of the timescale. In this universe, Daken survived being a Horseman and went back to life as usual, whilst Laura and O5 Cyclops got together and stayed together. Laura is quite a bit more confident and emotionally-savvy than her teenage comic-counterpart, but I hope that comes across as her having naturally matured and grown, and not just me being a lazy writer!
> 
> This fic is likely to ignore any canon established after December 2013.
> 
> The first chapter may well have some sections added to it, as it feels like the jumps in scenes are a little bit too big at the moment, so I'll put a note somewhere if that happens.

It starts unexpectedly.  


A chance meeting on a New York street, some years after their collision on Madripoor – but Laura knows it isn’t really chance that has brought them together again. Daken isn’t one to leave anything to chance. He’s likely tracked her down, only after playing this scene over and over again in his head, weighing out the possibilities, checking that every potential scenario ends in his favour.  


“Laura,” he greets pleasantly enough. “You’re looking well.”  


Laura has no time for games.  


“What do you want, Daken?”  


“I’m hurt,” he says, mock-affronted. “All this time and you don’t even return a compliment?”  


“I mean it, Daken,” Laura growls. She would shoulder past and keep walking, but if he’s in her stomping ground, she needs to know his play. “What do you want?”  


Daken drops the affable front, crosses his arms and regards Laura coolly.  


“We can play it this way if that’s how you want it. I need help.”  


Laura’s eyes narrow and she searches his face for the lie; he is as frustratingly unreadable as ever.  


“Real help or help with criminal activity?”  


He laughed lightly at that.  


“As if I’d come to you for help with the latter. No, I need a place to stay. It wouldn’t usually be a problem, but, well,” he will not meet her eyes. “I need somewhere secure. Just for two, maybe three nights.”  


He isn’t lying, but he is withholding information.  


“Who is looking for you?”  


“Some of Romulus’ old people. They’ve found a way to trigger some old programming in my brain – compromises my free will, I’m sure you understand.”  


Laura looks at him steadily.  


“Do you know who they are?”  


“Yes, but-“  


“I cannot offer you shelter, but I can help you take them down.”  


Daken raises an eyebrow.  


“Really?”  


He is a good actor, and Laura is never sure how much of the façade is real.  


“Yes.”  


“Well,” Daken will not meet her eyes again.  


“When do we start?”  


He flashes her a grin.  


“Whenever you’re ready.”  


*  


“Laura!” Scott calls from the lounge.  


“Yes?”  


“Your brother’s come to visit,” a pause, and then Scott adds: “Again.”  


Laura sighs, walks through from the kitchen to the living room. Sure enough, Daken is there, having scaled the wall of their building and picked open the door that leads into the apartment from the balcony. He looks thoroughly pleased with himself, as he always does. Scott keeps his distance; he is not overly fond of Daken – there is an unnerving quality to his presence, even though he is close to harmless in the company of Laura.  


“What is your aversion to the front door?” Laura asks. There is no anger in her voice, just a note of amusement.  


“There’s no fun in that,” Daken grins.  


“How do you keep getting past the security?” Scott is not so amused – exasperated would be the closest term. He’s checked and double checked the security measures and he can’t find any faults.  


“Sixty years practice, Summers.”  


This has become a familiar occurrence in the Kinney-Summers household. Once every two or three weeks, Daken will get into the house in some way or another to get in touch with Laura. Sometimes the purpose for his visits are clear from the offset – he will come covered in blood or with a broken limb, but don’t worry, no one’s followed him, and no, he won’t go to a damned hospital, just let him rest, the healing factor will return soon – but other days, like this day, he appears bright and dangerous, obviously ready for some impromptu adventure or another.  


He’s changed so much since Laura first met him. Really, a lot is the same – he’s still power-hungry, still caught up in playing little petty games with most everyone he meets, still a pathological liar – but there are changes, nonetheless. In the presence of the right people (and Laura is sure she is not the only one; he talks about Johnny Storm _a lot_ ) he makes a marked effort to impress; he goes the extra mile to mimic mannerisms, body language, even ideology – if anything, he seems eager to please. And perhaps there is some ulterior motive, perhaps it’s just a long-winded method of manipulation, but it seems much too inefficient, and Laura has to wonder if Daken is trying to make real allies (or friends, she dares to think on days where he’s been especially amiable) rather than mere disposable contacts or acquaintances. Sometimes, Laura thinks she catches the vaguest glimmer of a genuine smile on his face, and she wonders if Daken is finally overcoming decades of toxic conditioning.  


“Why are you here today?” Laura asks, again with the amused, genial tone. Scott shifts on his feet and looks between the two anxiously; last time Daken appeared out of the blue, Scott had been dragged into watching generic gory slasher flicks with him and his sister all night, all whilst the two discussed the inefficiency of the killers techniques and the unrealistic aspects surrounding each murder. Scott doesn’t count that night as a highlight of his life so far.  


“I’ve got a couple of hours free,” Daken says breezily. “Join me for a catch up?”  
Laura has put the laundry on; that will take a couple of hours before finish, so she is free. She glances at Scott; the corner of his mouth quirks, and he rolls his head slightly, and she recognises this as his ‘alright, go on then’ gesture.  


“Okay,” she smiles.  


The two go to Daken’s favourite teahouse and fill one another in on their lives, sharing details both fantastical and mundane, and Laura finds that she quite enjoys having a brother.  


*  


Daken’s phone starts buzzing at 8am. He is upon it swiftly, as he always is – it would not do to miss a crucial call from a contact or read an important text hours or minutes too late – and he sees that it is from Laura.  


He answers immediately.  


“Daken?” Laura’s voice is choked and Daken is immediately alarmed. Is she hurt? Has she been captured? What if she’s dying?  


“What is it? What’s wrong?” he asks, on his feet and pacing. Oh god. She should have called him sooner, she should have called him at the first sign of danger-  


“I’m pregnant.”  


Daken stops dead.  


“… what?”  


“I’m pregnant,” she says again, and ahh, it makes sense why she was choked up now (though, the tendency of people to cry when happy has always baffled Daken, it seems a very strange thing to do). “I’m sorry if I woke you, we just… we needed to tell someone…”  


Daken sits, takes a deep breath to calm his frayed nerves. Scott and Laura made the decision to become parents recently, after a great deal of soul searching; Daken has had many (uncharacteristically patient) discussions with Laura on the implications of her and Scott, semi-public, super-powered individuals bringing a child into the world – and now the months of deliberating have ended and the two are on their way to becoming a mother and father.  


“Congratulations,” he manages eventually, still processing his relief at Laura’s safety and the unexpected-expectedness of the news.  


“You’re the first person we’ve told,” Laura continues, voice still wavering with emotion. “We don’t want to tell everyone just yet, in case… in case something goes wrong. But we wanted you to know.”  


That’s a lot of faith to put in a man who deals in secrets, Daken thinks – but he won’t do anything against Laura’s will, and she knows this.  
To be trusted is a strange thing.  


“Daken, you’re going to be an uncle!”  


Oh no, he is, isn’t he? That sounds far too much like a real responsibility.  


As dawn’s light creeps in through the shutters, Daken’s not sure he minds.


	2. Chapter 2

Sarah Summers Kinney is born on a cool summer morning. Named for Laura’s mother, she is born in her parent’s apartment, and knows no one but them until the reality of the situation has set in and the calls for people to come and meet the new arrival start being made.  


“I can’t wait for you to meet her,” Laura gushes down the phone to Daken, giddy with excitement. Daken is always taken aback when Laura's speech reflects such emotion; sometimes it feels as if she and the girl he met years ago in Madripoor are different people entirely. “Can you come to the house tonight?”  


“Are you sure you don’t want some downtime before you have visitors?” Daken says anxiously.  


Laura rolls her eyes. Of all the people she’d expected to fuss over her pregnancy, Daken had not been one. She’d assumed he’d tease her at best, expected him to just ignore it for the most part and carry on their familial relationship as usual.  


This hadn’t been the case.  


Daken had been all over the place for weeks after she’d told him; sometimes he’d show up at the apartment several times a week, just quick visits to check Laura was okay, and then he’d disappear again. Other times, he had completely broken off contact for weeks, until Laura caved and contacted him – he would make excuses, resume his visits, and then repeat the cycle. It had all been very odd.  


“I haven’t got a good track record with children,” he’d told Laura on one of their teahouse catch-ups towards the end of her pregnancy. He was agitated in a way Laura had never seen before - picking relentlessly at the skin on his knuckles, fidgeting in his seat, unable to focus on any one thing. He hadn’t even touched his tea. “I ruin things, Laura. I could hurt her.”  


Laura sipped her own tea, calm on the surface, but really quite intrigued; she'd hardly expected such concern, such _worry_ from him. “You won’t.”  


“Laura, I’ve killed children before,” Daken said, torment in his voice, and Laura looked at him hard.  


“You won’t hurt her,” Laura said confidently, and it was a promise to herself as much as it was an assurance to him.  


“Daken, we’re fine, I want you to come and meet her today,” Laura insists in the present day.  


“Okay… okay, if you’re sure.”  


Daken arrives promptly at the arranged time, but hesitates to knock on the door. When he finally does, it is Scott that greets him.  


“Nice of you to use the door for once,” he says, and he is grinning ear-to-ear. “Come on, come and meet the little lady.”  


They go through to the lounge, and Laura is reclining on the sofa, Sarah cradled against her chest, gurgling contentedly. Scott settles down next to Laura, offers Sarah his little finger; she clasps it with her tiny hand, and Scott just looks down at her in awe.  


Daken stays standing awkwardly; he has torn countries down from the inside, fought gods and won, beaten death itself twice, and yet, in all his adult years, he has never felt so out of depth as he does right now.  


But Laura beams up at him and he forces himself to take a deep breath and attempts a smile.  


 _Don’t ruin this_ , he tells himself. _You can poison the rest of the world, but don’t turn this bad, just this one thing._  


He sits in the space next to Laura and lets himself look at Sarah. Nothing could have prepared him for how desperately small she is in the flesh, her little limbs twitching, tiny fingers curling and uncurling on the hand not holding onto her father’s.  


“Who’s this?” Laura asks the infant in a soft voice, propping her up with her arm so that she is blinking and squinting up at Daken. There is already fine, dark hair wisping over her little head, and her eyes… Daken has always abhorred the describing of newborn’s features as being of their mother or father, but he can see Laura’s eyes in Sarah’s, even at this early stage. Sarah gurgles at him curiously, and, as he holds one hand uncertainly in midair, Daken realises that he has no idea how to interact with a baby.  


“Are the pheromones intentional?” Laura asks, shifting her eyes from Sarah to Daken. Daken looks at her sharply, eyes wide as he hastily shuts off the outpour of soothing pheromones. His pheromones haven’t triggered unintentionally for _decades._  


How embarrassing.  


“I… I hadn’t realised-“  


Laura smiles and looks back down at Sarah. “If they make you feel better, that is fine.”  


Scott chuckles. “I think we could all do with some extra reassurance at the moment.”  


So Daken quietly renews his pheromone usage, albeit to a more subtle, controlled extent, and the room is silent again, save for Sarah’s little noises.  


“Would you like to hold her?” Laura asks after some minutes pass. Daken balks, meets Laura’s eyes to see if she’s making some sort of strange joke. He finds no trace of humour. Scott shifts uncomfortably on Laura’s other side, apparently a little anxious about his partner handing their newborn to a murderous sociopath, though he does not speak up.  


Daken almost declines, but then that traitorous part of his brain that compels him to take on anything that resembles a challenge pipes up, and he nods mutely.  


The transfer is slow and careful, and then Daken is gingerly holding Sarah against his chest. Laura’s hands hover nearby, ready to steady any sudden movements, or take her back if Daken has second thoughts, and Scott is keeping a particularly close eye out for any sign of danger.  


Looking at Daken, Laura isn’t sure she’s ever seen someone hold themselves so still before, and she wonders briefly if letting him hold Sarah has actually made part of his brain shut down – but, gradually, he seems to relax and let himself breathe again. Sarah blinks up at him and yawns, and when he tentatively offers her his free hand, she grabs one of his fingers and holds on tight with her tiny hand. Laura glances up from Sarah to look at Daken’s face, and he is wearing an expression she has never seen on him before: wonder. And, well, a little bit of fear, too.  


Sarah makes a loud, non-descript sound, and Daken immediately tenses again. Laura laughs quietly, puts a hand on Scott’s knee to reassure him – she understands where he’s coming from with his wariness over Daken and the baby, but she does think him jumping at every little movement from her brother is a bit much.  


The doorbell goes. Scott gets up to answer, and Daken shoots Laura a questioning look; she just shrugs and, as Daken lowers his gaze back to Sarah, her hand goes to her phone, and she snaps a picture of her half-brother holding her newborn.  


Daken glares up at her. She grins.  


“I couldn’t take it with Scott in here,” she says by way of explanation. “He might have interpreted the flash as an attack and blasted something.”  
Daken chuckles, but then his nostrils flare and he sends Laura an exasperated look.  


_“Him?”_  


“We didn't realise you would be here so long,” Laura shrugs. Daken glances at the clock and wow, has it really been half an hour? “You were acting so strangely when I was pregnant – we thought you would leave after a few minutes.”  


Daken opens his mouth to respond, but Logan walks in, and he shuts it again.  


“Yer lettin’ _him_ hold the kid?” Logan says before thinking. He immediately regrets it; Scott winces, Laura glares and there is a fleeting look of hurt on Daken’s face, quickly replaced by a mask of cool indifference.  


“Here, take her back,” Daken says quietly to Laura, carefully transferring Sarah back into her mother’s arms. “Call me if you need any help?”  


Laura nods. “Thank you for coming to meet her. It means a lot.”  


Daken leaves the apartment without a word to his father.


	3. Chapter 3

Daken is in his office in Madripoor when the call comes through.

“You want me to babysit?” he asks incredulously.

“Who else?” Laura replies. 

“Perhaps someone with less blood on their hands?”

“Oh, please, you’d never hurt her. Which is why you are our first choice! We know she will be safe with you.”

Daken sighs. He can’t let Laura down. “Okay. When?”

“Can you do Tuesday?”

Daken glances at his calendar. He has a lot of meetings Tuesday, but damned if he took this place over because he actually wanted to run it. That’s what Tyger Tiger is for. She’ll be pissed, but she can’t overrule him.

“Tuesday is fine.”

*

If someone had told Daken a few years ago that his future self would spend a night sat in his half-sister’s apartment, fretting over a baby because she wouldn’t settle down to go to sleep, he probably would’ve laughed and then stabbed them in the face.

And yet, here he is, vomit down one shoulder of his designer shirt, drool, tears and snot soaking the other, desperately pumping out pheromones and cooing to Sarah to try and quell her crying. It isn’t working.

He doesn’t understand what he’s done wrong. He’s fed her, changed her, done everything Laura told him to do, at the times she told him to do them. Why is Sarah still so unhappy?

Daken gets up and starts walking with her. The screaming doesn’t stop, and Daken briefly wonders if he was ever so noisy as an infant – but he quickly halts that train of thought. It doesn’t do to dwell on his childhood.

Talking. Maybe talking will help.

“Missing Laura?” he asks Sarah in a soft voice. He feels thoroughly ridiculous; why talk to something that can’t understand you? But he continues: “ _I’m_ missing Laura right now. She really owes me for this, what do I know about babies?”

In truth, he actually knows a fair bit about babies now, having used his speed-reading skills to get through a few books on the flight over – theory, however, seems to be quite far removed from the reality.

But Sarah starts to quieten down, and Daken is simultaneously relieved and panicked: relieved, because he has figured out how to settle her, but panicked because he doesn’t know what to talk to her about.

He is momentarily silent, racking his brain for some subject to prattle on about, but then Sarah starts to whimper again.

 _Poetry,_ he thinks desperately. _I know a lot of poetry._

He takes a deep breath.

“I leant upon a coppice gate, when Frost was spectre-grey…”

*

Laura pauses outside the door to the apartment, and motions for Scott to do the same.

“What is it?” Scott asks, alarmed – what if she can smell blood? What if Daken wasn’t so trustworthy, what if he’s killed Sarah-

“Can you hear that?” 

Scott takes a deep breath to calm himself, and listens hard. It sounds like someone in the apartment is… singing? 

He and Laura exchange looks. 

“You don’t think…?” he says, but Laura is grinning and very quietly opening the door, and when she pushes it to, it becomes quite clear.

Daken is singing a lullaby.

Laura presses a finger to her lips, and gestures for Scott to join her in tiptoeing through to the living room.

They find Daken on the sofa, cradling Sarah’s sleeping form and looking down at her quietly as he sings to her in Japanese.

Scott looks on in dumb astonishment. Laura smiles and clears her throat.

The lullaby stops immediately, and Daken snaps his head up, opens his mouth to defend himself, but finds no words, and slowly closes it again. He tells himself resolutely that he is not blushing.

“You must have been quite absorbed not to have heard or smelt us coming,” Laura says, crossing the room to sit next to him. She looks fondly down at Sarah, but does not move to take her back; she doesn’t want to wake her up just yet. “I never knew you could sing.”

“Not really a talent that means much in my line of work,” Daken mumbles, clearly mortified. Laura goes to put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, sees the dry puke there, and instead opts for a comforting pat on the forearm. “I didn’t know how to stop her crying.”

Laura smiles, and Scott comes and sits next to her.

“Crying’s kinda just what she does right now,” he shrugs. “Wish _we_ could stop her that easy.”

Daken seems to relax a little at that, and they slip into an easy conversation about their respective nights, before Daken has to move and head back to the airport. Sarah does not stir as Daken reluctantly gives her to Scott, and, once he’s changed into a clean shirt, Laura sees him out to the door.

“Thank you, Daken,” she says before he goes.

“My pleasure.”

“When we need a babysitter again, can we call you?” Laura asks hopefully. “You were great with her tonight.”

 _A new skill on the repertoire,_ Daken thinks, _Daken Akihiro: supervillain by day, babysitter by night. I have always been a man of contradictions, I suppose._

“Of course,” Daken says, and they part with a shared smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem Daken starts to recite in this chapter is 'The Darkling Thrush' by Thomas Hardy.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a brief mention of rape in this chapter.

Christmas is shit.

Christmas is shit, always has been shit and always will be shit.

Daken accepted these truths decades ago. Christmas had been a non-event in his first home, a forbidden American custom; when Romulus got a hold of him, he introduced the concept of it to Daken by ordering a kill on a large English family one Christmas morning. Daken had botched the mission, picking off a couple of the younger children and leaving the mother gurgling in her own blood before inexperience and sheer trauma prevented him from finishing what he'd started; Romulus had killed the rest, and beaten Daken unconscious for his failure. The punishment had continued for hours – perhaps days – after Daken awoke, and Romulus had dealt out _every_ kind of abuse. 

Following that, Romulus had made something of a habit of sending Daken out on kills during the holiday period. For Daken, Christmas was synonymous with dull, easy assassinations and a disturbing increase in skeevy behaviour on Romulus’ part; it was a thoroughly joyless time of year, even with his old master gone, and it was hopelessly unavoidable in the West.  


So, in previous years when Laura had bugged him to join her and Scott for at least part of Christmas day, he’d made his excuses; he was travelling back to Japan for the holiday season to do some reflecting; he had some serious crime issues that had to be dealt with immediately in Madripoor; someone he’d offended during the Heat pill debacle in LA was out to get him. All lies, of course, but he couldn’t stand to be around people at Christmas, and would much rather spend the days surrounding it holed up somewhere far away from the festivities so that he could plan his next moves.

Her previous failures haven’t stopped Laura from asking him again today.

They’re on one of their usual outings, only they’re in one of the shitty chain coffee shops that Daken so despises instead of a place that serves proper drinks. There’s tinsel everywhere, cheesy Christmas songs tinkling out of tinny speakers, and people all around them chattering about how much Christmas shopping they’d done, how expensive this time of year is, how lovely it will be to see all the relatives they secretly despise again. Daken slumps in his seat and stirs his bland green tea, grumbling as Laura tries to persuade him.

“We really want you to come over for Sarah’s first Christmas,” she says, and he wishes she’d stop giving him ‘the look’, the one she pulls when she’s trying to guilt him into doing stupid things like cutting back on how many people he kills on his coups and toning down the punishments for people that defy him in his territories. ‘The look’ is usually irritatingly effective, but Daken is too grumpy to feel particularly moved by it today.

“I’m not coming if _he’s_ going to be there,” he replies, crossing his arms like a petulant child.

Laura sighs and rolls her eyes. “Logan asks about you all the time, you know. He wishes things had gone differently between you two.”

“He _drowned_ me!” Daken hisses, and he’s not quite quiet enough, because a few of their fellow patrons glance nervously in their direction.

Motioning for him to quieten down, Laura goes on: “I know. I know. He regrets it, Daken. He is sorry.” Daken seems thoroughly unmoved, so Laura settles on her final tactic. She sighs sadly. “But if you really do not want to come, don’t worry. We just thought that, well, because you have been so good with Sarah, that you would want to come and celebrate with us this year.” She looks pointedly at Daken, who is still pouting, but shifting a little – a telltale sign that the guilt tripping is working. “She does not respond to Logan nearly so well as she does to you, and you’re so good at helping her sleep.” Daken is really trying not to meet her eyes now, though she noticed him puff up a little when she confirmed that Sarah liked him more than Wolverine – she’s pretty certain he’s close to breaking point. “You’ve been such a big help with her since she was born. She really likes you, and Christmas can be so stressful when you’re as young as she is. Having you around would be a big comfort.” Laura can see Daken digging his nails into the back of his one of his hands. Just a little bit more… “When she is older and we’re looking through Christmas photos, what will she think when she finds out you weren’t there on her first one?”

“Fine!” Daken finally concedes, and Laura is just able to suppress a satisfied smirk; hell, she’d only just been able to stop herself laughing towards the end of her melodramatic little spiel, but it had done the trick. “But I’m not talking to Logan.” 

“Suit yourself,” Laura shrugs. “As long as there is no shouting or fighting in the apartment, you can do what you like.” She glances at the clock and curses. “I was meant to be back five minutes ago. I’m going to go and check that Scott has not had a meltdown trying to handle Sarah on his own.” Laura beams across the table at Daken. “I will let you know times, etc. when I know. See you soon!”

And she goes, leaving Daken alone in the overpriced coffee shop to sulk into his cold green tea.

*

“Aaaaaaaa!”

“Aaaaaaaa!”

“Aaaaaaaaaaaa!!”

“Aaaaaaaaaaaa!!”

Laura’s certainly glad on Christmas day that someone is finding Sarah’s propensity for being noisy amusing. At five months old, she’s copying noises and wailing them happily at anyone who’ll listen, and Daken is thoroughly taking advantage of that fact – partly because he finds it deeply amusing in a way he doesn’t quite understand, and partly because every time Logan tries to talk to him, he can just cut him off with a loud, incomprehensible noise, start off a call-and-response with the kid and argue later that he wasn’t being childish and avoiding conversation, he was simply taking a vested interest in Sarah’s development.

As it is, Logan has stopped trying to talk over the cacophony of meaningless sounds, instead choosing to mope over a beer and hope that Daken will come around as the night goes on.

Besides Daken’s, thus far successful, attempts at avoiding all contact with his father, Laura thinks the day has gone quite well. Sarah has been thoroughly enjoying all the attention, rolling around the floor when she’s down there and happily burbling away to anyone who picks her up, as well as giggling delightedly as she grabs and bats at her new toys – she’s particularly enjoying the garishly coloured octopus with different textures and squeakers in its legs that Daken bought over for her. Scott has spent most of the day fretting in the kitchen, making ungodly sounds as vegetables boil over and suspicious burning smells creep out of the oven, but he occasionally pops out to coo over Sarah and make small talk with Logan, who is looking morose due to his son’s ignoring him. Away from his juvenile methods of avoiding conversation with Logan, Daken has been a great help, as Laura had predicted, keeping Sarah entertained and happy with a mix of pheromones and his generally being good with her.

They had agreed only to get Sarah gifts between them; being partners, Scott and Laura had bought each other things, but Laura hadn’t wanted Daken to turn up with extravagant gifts for herself and probably Scott, and nothing for Logan, just to rub salt in the wounds. As it was, Daken had just transferred all his energy into buying Sarah just about every developmental toy under the sun, so they’ve spent all day having to manoeuvre around the small mountains of playthings scattered around the floor.

Laura resolves to have a chat with Daken about spoiling Sarah – but she figures it can wait until after Christmas.

Laura flops down next to her brother after helping Scott wrestle the partially ruined turkey out of the oven. He and Sarah have quietened down a bit now, Sarah batting his chest and giggling as Daken boops her nose gleefully; on the opposite chair, Logan is watching them with a sad, wistful expression. Sarah makes a happy sound at Laura’s reappearance, waves her hands in the direction of her mom, and Daken reluctantly hefts her off his chest and into Laura’s arms.

“Go help Scott dish up Christmas dinner, Daken,” she says as Sarah giggles up at her.

“What’s left of Christmas dinner, you mean,” Daken grins, gets up and stretches indulgently before making his way to the kitchen. Laura waits until he is out of sight before she approaches Logan, perches on the arm of the chair he’s drooping in.

“Are you okay?” she asks. Logan will not meet her eyes. “I know he’s being difficult, but we knew he would be.”

“I know,” Logan says sadly. “I know. Jus’ wish he’d let me talk to him instead o’ cuttin’ me off or ignorin’ me.”

“He might come around,” Laura smiles tightly; false hope is better than none, she supposes.

*

By eight o’clock, Christmas dinner is over, Sarah is sleeping in her cot, and the most intense game of Monopoly ever has culminated with Daken winning by an absolute mile. Laura resolves never to play board games with Daken again; as it turns out, he takes them very seriously and is a very ruthless player, having fleeced them all quite thoroughly from the start. He’d even deigned to deal with Logan during the game – and Logan had seemed happy for some sort of interaction with his son that hadn’t been wholly negative, even if it hadn’t been at all positive, either.

But now Daken is getting ready to leave, and Logan, in his desperation to get some sort of dialogue going with his kid, has decided to leave with him; Daken is not pleased, though he voices none of his displeasure, and Laura can see that he is waiting to get outside before he starts tearing into his father. They exchange farewells, and Laura and Scott share a nervous glance as their guests leave.

Father and son walk silently down the corridor towards the stairwell, and it’s not until they’re descending the stairs that Logan attempts to start a conversation.  


“So, uh, Daken,” he begins pathetically. “How’s yer Christmas been?” Logan regrets the words almost as soon as they’re out of his mouth, but Daken jumps on them and it’s too late.

“Well, I haven’t been raped yet this year,” he says bitingly, and Logan winces and wishes he’d said nothing. “Romulus not being around anymore, you know? So it’s been an improvement on most of the others, by all accounts.”

“Fuck, Daken,” Logan says. “I’m sorry…” He reaches out to put a hand on Daken’s shoulder, but Daken flinches away before he’s even touched him, baring his teeth in a furious snarl.

“Keep your hands off of me,” he snaps. “I came here today for Laura and Sarah. I don’t want anything to do with you, don’t try to kid yourself that we can play happy families.”

Logan dips his head mutely, and they continue down the stairs in tense silence. Daken bites down the rage, claws back his calm demeanour, and, when they reach the exit, he speaks again.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly, and Logan looks at him wide-eyed and hopeful. “I shouldn’t have taken that out on you.” Daken reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulls out a card still in its envelope, offers it to Logan. Logan regards it suspiciously as he takes it, hoping it isn’t a bomb or something of the like. “I would have given it to you earlier, but,” Daken looks at his feet, scuffs the toe of one very expensive shoe against the floor. “I didn’t want Laura to think I was going soft on you. She’d tease, you know?”

Logan nods mutely, and Daken thinks he sees hope in his father’s eyes, thinks he sees him swallow down a lump. 

“Yeah,” Logan says. “Yeah, I understand.” He doesn’t open the card, opts to try to give Daken a sort of manly-pat-on-the-arm-dealie – but Daken backs away, shaking his head, and Logan gets the message, nods again. “Well. Guess I’ll be seeing ya.”

“Quite,” Daken replies non-committally. “Merry Christmas, Logan.”

“Yeah. Yeah, merry Christmas, kid.”

And they part ways.

Logan only opens the card when he gets back to his quarters at the Jean Grey School. It is varying shades of baby blue, the front of it reading ‘TO MY DADDY AT CHRISTMAS’ in childish bubble writing. He raises an eyebrow, willing to dismiss it as being reflective of Daken’s sick sense of humour – perhaps inside there’ll be a sensible message? Maybe even a call for reconciliation; some things are just easier to put down in words.

He opens the card and there, in Daken’s fancy, unmistakeable cursive scrawl, the message reads:

_‘Get fucked.’_

Daken laughs all the way back to Madripoor.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brief mentions of past abuse/rape and incest (though no incest actually takes place) in this chapter.

Psychopath. Murderer. Manipulator. 

Scott has long since done his research on Daken.

What little data there is on his brother-in-law is not particularly nice.

Information on the man’s past is chequered and vague, but there is evidence of abuse and brainwashing, proof of Daken undergoing decades upon decades of conditioning under a man known only as ‘Romulus’. Under him, Daken was an assassin, a cold-blooded killer who did not question orders, a slaughterer that specialised in cruelty. Daken has an unspeakable amount of blood on his hands, and it has been widely speculated that he is incapable of compassion.

Scott does not know how to reconcile the Daken he reads about with the one that dotes on his half-sister’s daughter.

And people have tried to ‘fix’ Daken in the past, Scott has found – Wolverine, primarily, though all his attempts have failed quite spectacularly. Daken has thoroughly resisted ‘bettering’ himself, if only because his ideas of personal improvement do not line up with those of other people.

Yet, the Daken Scott knows defers to Laura completely: if Laura asks him to do something, he does it; should Laura give him a command, he follows it without question; when Laura admonishes Daken for his actions, he cowers and quietly promises not to disappoint her in future. 

So, baffled by the dissonance between the Daken he’s read about and the Daken he knows, Scott goes to Laura.

“I don’t get it,” he says. “Why is he so different around you?”

Laura would be lying if she said she didn’t have some inkling as to why. 

It began soon after their reunion on that New York street years ago, when she’d agreed to accompany Daken on that mission to prevent some of Romulus’ old people from turning him back into a mindless weapon. As they’d tracked them down, Daken had brutally killed anyone that stood in their way; Laura had told him again and again to stop, to use non-lethal methods, but he hadn’t listened, and finally, furious after Daken had killed a man who had surrendered, Laura attacked him. After a short scuffle, she’d pinned him to the ground, threatened to call Wolverine and have him locked up if he didn’t start listening to her, if he didn't accept that they would be doing things _her_ way from then on. The assault seemed to have triggered something in Daken – his body had gone slack, eyes glazed over, and his only response to her was an eventual, affirmative nod of ‘yes, I will do as I’m told’. For a while after she’d let him up, he’d been subdued, shying away whenever she motioned even vaguely towards him, flinching if she spoke to him too loudly. 

And he’d been perfectly obedient.

After some time, his bravado returned – but, though he became superficially difficult again (arguing pettily on points that hardly mattered, sulking when Laura told him to tone down the violence), Laura remained in charge, and Daken had done as he was told. He responded particularly well to praise from her, and, as their task had neared completion, he was glancing at her expectantly after every obeyed command, desperate for her approval.

When they had made their move on the last of Romulus’ agents – an aging man who had been close to Daken’s old master at one point – he had noticed their newfound dynamic.

“Found yourself a new master, boy?” he’d mocked, even as Daken held him against the wall by his throat. Daken made a vicious sound, but Laura hadn’t given him a command, so he did not make the kill. “You never last long on your own, do you? She’s a damn sight prettier than Romulus or Sabretooth, ain’t she? Suppose that makes it better when she’s beating and fucking you into submission, eh?”

Laura grimaced, and Daken looked over his shoulder, pleadingly; Laura gave him the signal, and Daken snapped the man’s neck.

Afterwards, Daken hadn’t wanted to talk about what the man said, so Laura hadn’t pushed.

“I think I am a Romulus substitute,” Laura says, and Scott knits his brows together. 

“Romulus? As in, the guy that brainwashed him? As in, the guy that ordered the kill on his mom? That Romulus?”

“That is correct.”

“Why, though?” Scott is frowning. “Why would he want to anyone to replace Romulus? Let alone you, you and him get on great.”

“He was with Romulus for a long time. I understand that Romulus controlled much of Daken’s life whilst he was around, and when Daken tried to make it on his own, he lost direction quite quickly, as Romulus never truly prepared Daken for life on his own. I believe that is why he was taken in so easily by Sabretooth – he has implied there was more to that particular alliance, but he won’t elaborate on it.”

“So, you’re saying he wants someone around who’ll tell him what to do?”

Laura shrugs.

“I think it is somewhat more complicated than that. But, if we are to simplify it, I would say yes, he craves strong leadership and wants someone to give him direction and validate him when he does what he is told.”

Scott shifts uncomfortably. “That doesn’t sound very healthy.”

“Perhaps it isn’t,” says Laura. “But I would rather he not fall back under someone who would abuse him and use him as a weapon, as Romulus and Sabretooth did. As long as I have influence over Daken, I can steer him towards doing good. In fact, I think he is making improvements in Madripoor right now.”

*

“I don’t understand you.”

Daken glances up from the paperwork he’s scribbling on. On the opposite side of his desk, Tyger Tiger is leaning back in her chair, arms folded, looking at him quizzically. 

“I’m glad,” he replies, and goes back to signing sheet after sheet of paper.

It isn’t often that they get together like this – Daken is hardly around enough to schedule regular meetings – but these little conferences usually begin with a lot of grandiose posturing on Daken’s part, and end with a lot of shouting and frustration from Tyger. 

Today has been different.

Normally, these meetings would entail Daken putting forward non-negotiable plans to enable more dubious trade or to allow very questionable businesses more power in Madripoor – if something were to bring in more financial stability for _him_ , he wouldn’t care two jots about the effect it had on the country at large. This, of course, meant undoing a lot of Tyger’s good work, and such plans would always be met with initial resistance, even they were ultimately inevitable; Daken could and would bring Tyger’s beloved country back down to its knees if she refused to support his plans, so she would relent and let her loathing for him fester.

Tyger stormed into this meeting in the middle of an already bad day, quite prepared to give Daken as hard a time she could without eliciting serious consequences; only, when she’d sat down, body surging with adrenaline as she prepared for the inevitable shouting match, Daken had presented her with plans to _better_ the island. No more trafficking, no more illegal trading, no more leniency for crimes against the poor by the rich. There are even long-term solutions proposed for fixing the wealth gap and eliminating poverty.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Tyger continues. “You’ve spent the past few years running this place into the ground with all your new rules, and now you want to reverse all that and turn Madripoor into some sort of utopia. What’s the ulterior motive?”

“It was all getting rather predictable, don’t you think?” Daken says, not looking up. “’Super-villain’ takes over small, corrupt country and drags it even further into the mud for his own profit. It was amusing to begin with, but now I’m ready for something with a little more scope.”

Tyger sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “I know you’re having a lot of fun playing dictator – benevolent dictator now, apparently - but Madripoor isn’t a toy. How long before you change your mind again?”

“This isn’t some flight of fancy, Tyger.”

“Isn’t it? Do you know how long it’s going to take to repeal all of the awful shit you’ve put in motion these past few years? It’s going to take _decades_ for you to start seeing the improvement you’ve outlined here.”

Daken shrugs, pushes the finished pile of documents over to Tyger. “We have decades to spare, assuming we aren’t wiped out by the annual extinction-level threats. Madripoor will prosper.”

“I still don’t understand what’s triggered this,” Tyger says, gathering the paperwork. “Is this about proving something to Wolverine? Trying to one-up what daddy did for Madripoor?”

Daken glowers at her. “I have nothing to prove to _him_.”

“Who, then? Because this is far too altruistic for a murderer like you. Has someone turned you soft?”

“It’s none of your business,” Daken snaps.

“I’ll take your being flustered as a yes.”

Daken’s hands twitch, and Tyger wonders if she might have gone a little too far, but then he takes a deep breath and exhales slowly.

“This meeting is over. Get out and get started.”

“Yes, sir,” Tyger says, getting to her feet and exiting the room with an amused smile.

Daken grumbles under his breath, and taps out a text to Laura.

_‘Madripoor’s on its way out of the gutter.’_

A few hours later, a reply comes through:

_‘Good work, Daken.’_

Daken smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a filler chapter, as I have a lot on over the next few days but don't want to go too long with updating - if I leave it too long, I'll stop entirely, and that's a habit I'm trying to break! 
> 
> Next time: Scott and Laura get married~


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a very brief mention of domestic violence in this chapter.
> 
> Just wanted to say thanks for the comments on previous chapters! They give me life and spur me to write more silly family fic. I'll hopefully start replying individually again when I have more time on my hands~

Laura and Scott are getting married.

“We want you to be there, of course,” Laura tells a visiting Daken as he herds Sarah – who has learnt to crawl, gleefully zooming around whenever she’s on the floor – away from plugs and other such dangers.

“Are you sure?” he asks sceptically, prying Sarah off of a houseplant that she’s dangerously close to toppling. “I can’t imagine the other guests being overly thrilled at my being there.”

“When did you start worrying about what others thought of you?”

“Yeah, come on, Daken,” Scott says. “We need someone to look after Sarah on the day.”

“It will have to be Logan if it isn’t you.”

“I’ll come,” Daken says immediately.

Scott and Laura grin at one another.

*

“Where are you getting your dress from?”

“We are just going to keep it casual. This is only going to be a small wedding, Daken.”

Daken rolls his eyes. Laura is really not taking advantage of all the potential shopping she could be doing in the run-up to her and Scott’s marriage.

“Come on, Laura, I know people. I could have you and Scott looking incredible on the day for next to nothing.”

In his head, he quickly runs through the list of fashion designers he knows that he hasn’t murdered just to check that that’s true.

“I am not really a dress person, Daken,” Laura says.

“Oh, please, Laura, there must be _some_ design you like. If not, perhaps a suit? Scott could wear the dress if you wanted to be subversive – he’s got _lovely_ legs…”

“Daken!” Laura laughs, swatting his arm. Daken feigns innocence. “Okay, I will come dress shopping with you. But I do not want anything too expensive.”

“Sure,” Daken grins, and he starts making a list of designers to call. He won’t tell Laura that he’s sorting Scott’s wedding outfit out too.

*

By the time the day of the wedding rolls around, even Sarah is decked out in designer baby wear.

Scott and Laura get married at the Jean Grey School, in a hall specially made to safely carry out mutant weddings - built so that nothing can get in, be it sentinels, uninvited students, or alien invasions, allowing weddings to reach their conclusion before anyone involved has to suit up and deal with the threat of the day.

Scott spends almost the entire day watery eyed, and, by the time Laura comes down the aisle with Logan - in the gorgeous dress Daken sorted out for her, of course - Scott is choking back sobs, and spends the remainder of the ceremony hiccupping and blubbering his vows. Laura seems to find it very endearing, smiling her way through, and, from his front row seat, Daken can see that several of the guests are dabbing away at their eyes, sees his pathetic father wiping his on the sleeves of his suit. Quite thoroughly unaffected by all the emotions running wild, Sarah bats away at her uncle’s chest from her perch on his lap as Daken looks on, quite baffled by the things people find poignant.

But Laura is happy, so he is happy.

In the break between the ceremony and the meal and speeches and so forth, Daken has the pleasure of watching everyone present deliberate on whether to approach him to fuss over Sarah, or keep their distance and wait for her to be transferred to someone else, because almost _everyone_ in the room has had some sort of unpleasant encounter with Daken in the past.

“Can you use your pheromones to reassure them?” Laura asks in a hushed voice, having momentarily broken away from the masses to join Daken and Sarah at their otherwise empty table.

“I thought you didn’t like me using them?”

“I do not like you using them to manipulate people. Using them for benign purposes is fine.”

Daken raises an eyebrow, but obliges, and starts emitting pheromones to put the other guests at ease. Laura smiles at him, bumps her forehead lightly against his.

“Thank you. Promise you won’t stab anyone if they get on your nerves?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he agrees, and, satisfied with his answer, Laura goes to rejoin Scott, who is _still_ crying across the room by the snack table.

Johnny Storm is the first to approach Daken.

“Hey,” he says awkwardly, sitting in the chair next to his once-friend.

“Johnny,” Daken greets, looking at him pleasantly. Sarah looks Johnny over, one hand stuffed in her mouth.

“Never knew you liked kids,” Johnny says, and Sarah decides that she likes this new person, pulling her hand out of her mouth and slamming it against Daken’s expensive shirt so that she can make an approving sound at Johnny.

“I don’t,” Daken grimaces, looking distastefully down at the saliva marks on his clothes. “But this one’s generally an exception.”

“Da-keh!” Sarah shouts up at her uncle. “Da-keh!”

“Cute,” Johnny grins, and it’s at that moment, as Daken and Johnny are huddled together, smiling down at Sarah, that one of the photographers snaps a picture of them.

“My, my, boys,” a passing Emma Frost chuckles. “Congratulations. You could be a stock photo on a gay adoption article.”

Daken glares and Johnny splutters, but before Daken can make a biting retort, Laura has returned, this time with Jubilee and her son, Shogo, in tow.

“Why is Emma Frost even here?” Daken grumbles to Laura as she scoops Sarah out of his lap.

“We could not invite the other Scott without her,” Laura shrugs.

“So, Daken,” Johnny says as Jubilee and Laura start cooing over Sarah. “Wanna go get some food sometime this month? I’ve got a few days off, so, y’know, if you’re around…”

“Sure,” Daken purrs. These ‘dates’ are fairly regular occurrences, and always good opportunities to catch up on potentially useful superhero gossip or to persuade Johnny that Reed couldn’t possibly notice if some of his experimental technology happened to get ‘borrowed’ for a little while – thanks to Johnny, Daken has enough faulty teleportation technology and defective force field generators and the like that he’s filled a whole room in his LA mansion. Their dates _also_ generally entail some pretty mind-blowing sex, but fucking is _definitely_ secondary to the business side of things. Definitely. “Just let me know when and where…”

Daken starts to run his hand up Johnny’s forearm, smiling slyly when his companion’s breath hitches a little, but he can feel eyes on him, and he turns to find Shogo looking at him intently.

“… what?” asks Daken. Shogo is a little over ten years old, still young enough to be cute and nonthreatening, but clearly on his way to becoming an awkward teenager. Daken can’t help but feel a little unnerved by the stare – kids are terribly hard to read.

“I like your hair,” Shogo says.

“Thank you,” Daken replies, and he’s relieved, because he’s actually had this conversation a lot with kids on his travels, and it’s usually fairly predictable – next, Shogo will either ask to touch his hair or ask his mom if he can have his hair like it. Or both.

“Can I touch it?” Shogo asks.

“Shogo,” Jubilee says warningly, and there’s a touch of panic in her voice – not keen, apparently, for her son to be hanging around the sociopathic murderer for too long.

_My reputation precedes me_ , thinks Daken, but he dips his head and says ‘of course’, and Shogo runs a hand gingerly over the silky strip of hair on top of Daken’s head.

“Cool,” he says, pulling his hand away and returning to his mom. “Mom, can I have my hair like that?”

Daken chuckles, and when he turns back to Johnny, the blonde is grinning at him.

“’Don’t like kids’, huh?” Johnny says. “You’re pretty damn good with ‘em. Maybe you should drop the villainous mastermind thing and be a kindergarten teacher or something?”

Daken glares. “On second thoughts, maybe I’m _not_ going to be free this month-“

“Alright, alright,” Johnny holds his hands up. “You’re not a sweetheart with kids, you’re a big, scary crime boss and there is nothing remotely cute about you.”

“That’s more like it,” Daken purrs, and Johnny gasps audibly as a hand skims his thigh under the table.

“Daken!” Laura says sharply, not even having to look at him to know what he’s doing. Daken jumps, puts his hands on the table and lowers his head sheepishly.

Johnny hopes Daken doesn’t recognise his sudden coughing fit as the laughter it really is.

*

Why Laura and Scott let him sit at the head table, Daken does not know. Daken’s also struggling to fathom why they thought seating him next to his father would be a good idea. Equally perplexed, Logan has his body turned away from his son – having already been snubbed by him earlier, ignored when he tried to approach him after the ceremony, Logan figures it’s best to wait for Daken to initiate conversation. With Sarah back with her mother and father for the time being, Daken needs someone else to help him avoid talking to his father so that he doesn’t look like a sulky child, so he turns to the guests on his other side – Jubilee, who had been Laura’s bridesmaid, and Shogo, sat with his mom because of the lack of people he knows around the room that his mom would be happy to have him sitting with – and takes a sudden, keen interest in their affairs, and if Jubilee isn’t keen to humour him, Shogo sure is.

_The importance of making allies in situations like these,_ Daken thinks, as Shogo animatedly tells him about his latest science projects and inventions. The kid’s damn smart, a real child prodigy if he’s actually created all the stuff he says he has. Daken’s knowledge of technobabble is just enough that he’s keeping up, even if only on a superficial level, and he makes a mental note to check up on the kid in a few years – he always has room for genius inventors on his taskforce.

Eventually, Jubilee and Daken temporarily switch places so that she can talk to Logan and Laura whilst Shogo beguiles Daken with information on how he’s close to completion on a working replica of Tony Stark’s MK V armour. Jubilee keeps an uneasy eye on her son, but nevertheless chats away to her old friends before it’s time for food, and she takes back her normal seat.

Daken successfully avoids conversation with his father for the duration of the meal – which is, of course, wonderful, seeing as he sorted the catering as well as the bride and groom’s outfits – and then Shogo wants to talk to him more, and Sarah gets plonked back onto his lap for a while, so he has more than enough distraction. Logan huffs a bit, but says nothing.

And then it’s time for the speeches.

Daken wishes Laura and Scott had just let him write everyone’s speeches. Sure, he has the empathy level of a cardboard box and can count the number of people he gives a damn about on one hand, so it’s hardly surprising that they _didn’t_ let him - but if there’s one thing Daken’s good at, it’s saying the right thing, and saying it well.

The people giving speeches may have the deep emotional connections to everyone involved to give their words poignancy, but that hardly makes up for their bumbling delivery.

Logan is the first to stand, and his address _should_ be somewhat acceptable, Daken thinks, what with all the rousing speeches he must give to the kids at the school all the time.

He clears his throat.

“The first time me ‘n Laura met, she tried to kill me.”

There’s nervous laughter from some guests. Daken lowers his face into his hands, and it’s only the fact that he promised Laura he’d be nice that stops him from groaning. What the hell made Logan think that was an appropriate start to a wedding speech?

“But that was all a big misunderstanding, and from there, me ‘n her came to understand each other as family. I mean, yer not really my daughter, Laura-“

Daken lifts his head out of his hands to give Logan an incredulous look – several people notice and some struggle to hold back inappropriate laughter, Johnny being one, and Daken’s sure the photos, if there are any, of this moment will be priceless. Laura herself has an eyebrow raised, also a little confused about where Logan is going with this.

“- but – no, I mean, ya are, but I wasn’t there for ya enough, and I’m sorry for that-“

Daken tunes out after that, and is reminded exactly how ashamed he is to be related to Logan.

Scott’s speech is only a slight improvement; having just managed to get his shit together and stop crying, he immediately starts blubbering again, rendering most of his speech an incoherent mess – to his credit, he at least gets a few laughs at the jokes and anecdotes he manages to choke out through the tears. Finally, Alex – Scott’s brother and best man – delivers a blessedly concise, funny, and sincere speech, and the wedding draws to a close.

*

Daken is on Sarah-duty at the reception that evening, though she spends most of the night sleeping and drooling quite happily on his chest whilst her uncle flirts with Johnny Storm and gets thoroughly harassed by Shogo, who is keen to show him his painstakingly put together Pokémon team, them having discussed video games at the head table earlier.

“It’s a good team, but I’d swap out Hydreigon for one of the other pseudo-legendaries,” Daken advises. “Still a viable choice in OU, but Fairy-types are a massive threat to it, and it’s fairly easy to out speed.”

“Cool, what would you use instead?” Shogo says, but then he gets called away by his mom, and he reluctantly leaves.

“Howdo you know so much about Pokémon?” Johnny asks, one eyebrow raised.

Daken crosses his arms defensively. “I travel _a lot_ , Johnny. Sometimes I read, sometimes I make plans, sometimes I play games.”

“ _Pokémon_ , though?”

“It’s a very deep, strategic game!”

“Yeah, right,” Johnny grins. Daken pouts, but before he can get up and stomp away, Sarah stirs and makes excited sounds at Johnny.

“You’re lucky you’re cute,” Daken grumbles, and Johnny’s not sure if it’s directed at him or the baby.

*

The hall is rapidly emptying, guests trailing out and saying their final goodbyes and congratulations. With there being less people around, and Daken being on his own, sat humming quietly to a dozing Sarah in one corner of the room, Logan approaches his son, not wanting to leave without having talked to him all day.

“Hey, Daken,” Logan says, standing awkwardly beside his son.

“Logan,” Daken greets flatly, not looking at his father.

“How’ve you been?”

“Fine.”

A pause.

“Heard yer doing good things in Madripoor.”

“Yep.”

Logan chews his lip.

“Yer real good with the kid.”

“I know.”

Silence again.

“Listen, Daken, I’m real sorry about everything that’s happened between us-“

Daken cuts him off. “The only thing I’m sorry about is not killing you on that train when I had the chance.”

Logan recoils, hurt. “You mean that, do you?”

“Yes,” Daken says, though he sounds more weary than spiteful.

Logan sighs. “Why’ve you gotta be like this, Daken? We could make this right, but you just keep pushing me away.”

“’We could make this right,’” Daken snorts. He finally looks up at his father. “Maybe I don’t _want_ to make things right with you. You’re not entitled to my time just because you’re my father.”

“We’re _family_ , Daken.”

“No,” Daken snaps. “We’re not.”

Logan looks at him sadly. “What about Laura, then?” he asks. “Is she family? What about Sarah?”

Daken turns away.

“Well?” Logan presses.

“This conversation is over.”

“Alright,” Logan says, defeated. “Have it your way.”

And he walks away.

Laura quietly joins Daken a few minutes later.

“Thank you for coming today,” Laura says, squeezing his shoulder gently. “You have been great, Daken.”

“It’s been my pleasure,” he says, smiling as Sarah stirs and mumbles ‘da-keh’ at him.

Sarah reaches for her mother. Laura picks her up and Daken gets to his feet.

“Shogo cannot wait to see you again,” Laura teases as they head for the exit.  “I think he said something about you owing him a Pokémon battle?”

Daken chuckles. “Better put a new team together, then,” he affectionately brushes some hair out of Laura’s face. “You looked great today.”

“You made sure of it,” Laura says, and Scott lifts a hand in greeting as she and Daken draw near. Scott has finally stemmed the flow of tears for good, it seems – a pity, Daken thinks, it had been quite amusing while it lasted. “When will we be seeing you next?”

Daken shrugs. “Whenever Sarah needs babysitting, I suppose. Or I’ll drop in next time I’m seeing Johnny. Whichever comes first.”

“Have a safe journey, then,” Laura says, sharing a smile with Daken as he goes. “Thanks again.”

And Daken leaves, relieved that Laura either hadn’t noticed that he’d quietly stolen Wolverine’s phone-with-lots-of-sensitive-contacts-and-info-stored-on-it, or that she just hadn’t cared.

Several prank texts and phonecalls later, Daken is quite assured that Logan is going to be pretty unpopular amongst his superhero friends over the next couple of days.

*

“What? It was funny.”

Unfortunately, a few weeks later, Laura _has_ pulled Daken up on his little escapade with Logan’s phone, and now Daken is guiltily trying to defend himself.

“You sent Jean Grey over one hundred voicemails of you screaming ‘JEAN’ in Logan’s voice.”

“What’s not funny about that?”

“You sent Hank Pym a text asking him to come out for a drink if he wasn’t too busy slapping his current girlfriend.”

“Well-“

“You sent several texts to Raze about sleeping with his mother – which does not even make sense unless Raze knew they were from you and not Logan.”

“It does make sense - no one wants to think about their parents fucking,” Daken says. “Is Raze even still around? I thought all that timestream shit made him disappear again.”

“No, he is back, I think.”

“Damn, I hate that guy,” Daken wonders how his half-brother’s return slipped his radar. “I’m the original angry Wolverine son, and I’m _better_.”

Daken makes a mental note to track down and kill Raze.

“Quite,” Laura says drily. “You are to apologise to all these people, or certain photos from the wedding are going to go viral.”

Daken goes pale.

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try me,” Laura says. “We have a lot to use against you. You watching Shogo play Pokémon. You cuddling Sarah whilst she sleeps. You-“

“The gay adoption photo with Johnny!” Scott shouts from the kitchen.

“That one,” Laura nods.

“Laura, no,” Daken says desperately. “I have a reputation to uphold.”

“Then apologise.”

Daken begrudgingly apologises to the tens of people he abused and spends several weeks sulking and cracking down on crime in Madripoor just so he’s got an excuse to stab people.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this turned out long~
> 
> Next time: Wolverine, Daken and X-23 team-up with Shark-Woman's X-Force squad to investigate some cryptic plans to restart the Weapon X program.
> 
> (Yeah, I'm putting grown-up Shark-Girl in this fic because I've gone mad with power - we may be veering even more into crack!fic territory than I initially intended, but I have everything roughly planned out and I swear this is leading somewhere!)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I said in the notes last time that this chapter would involve X-Force business - I LIED. Not intentionally, I just realised it'd work better elsewhere in the story, so that's been pushed back a couple of chapters.
> 
> Instead enjoy: MORE FILLER whilst I work on making the rest of the story fit together properly.

_Spring was coming to a close in Sendai. The cherry blossom trees had long since bloomed and subsequently shed their pale flowers; the petals lay wilted and browned on the ground, but their presence was of no concern to the groups of young boys that played hide-and-seek in the pretty green grounds by their homes._

_It was a pleasant afternoon when Akihiro - a young boy, hardly five years old – set out to join his friends in those grounds; his mother liked to have him out and about, especially when his father was away, and he always preferred to have people to share his time with, as opposed to spending it alone. He found his friends, as he often did, darting about amongst the trees, and he would have rushed to join them immediately, had they not come to a strange halt when they spotted him, gathering into a group to whisper and glance at him uneasily._

_Akihiro had thought it strange, but it hardly dissuaded him from approaching the group anyway._

_“Can I play?” he asked when he reached his friends._

_The others boys shifted uncomfortably and looked to one of the bigger kids, a tall boy, the oldest among them. He stepped forward, and Akihiro looked at him, puzzled. There had never been any problem with his joining them before._

_“We don’t want you playing with us anymore,” the older boy said, and Akihiro’s face fell._

_“Why not?” he asked, and he moved one hand over the other to pick at his knuckles. “Did I do something wrong?”_

_“My father says you’ve got dirty blood,” said the boy. “He says you’re nothing but trouble and that we shouldn’t play with you anymore.” The boy shoved him lightly, and Akihiro fell back a couple of paces. “So go away!”_

_“I…” Akihiro looked at the floor, arms wrapped around himself. When he looked back up at the other children, his eyes were swimming with tears. “I don’t understand.”_

_“Go away!” the boy said again. “We don’t want to play with you!”_

_Akihiro sniffed, looked desperately for support amongst the other children present, but they all avoided meeting his eyes – pretended, almost, that he wasn’t there._

_So Akihiro turned and ran, trying and failing to hold back tears._

_Natsumi knew immediately when her son had returned home, for a wave of dread and sorrow washed over her like a bout of nausea. Akihira loved the boy, their… son – but he did not have to deal with him on the constant basis that Natsumi did, was not so manipulated by every change of Akihiro’s mood. At first, Natsumi thought this affectation of her feelings was down to her own maternal instincts – for surely every mother felt her child’s emotions as if they were her own? When Akihiro was happy, she too was ecstatic, heady with joy – but Akihiro’s sadness afflicted Natsumi with incomparable grief, too heavy to bear as often as she did._

_The boy sought his mother out for comfort that day, as he was wont to do when his father was away. He found her kneeling in the house, pinching the bridge of her nose and exhaling slowly before she looked at him with a forced, sympathetic smile._

_“What’s wrong, Akihiro?” she asked, opening her arms and fighting to stay still as the crying boy came in to hug her, every instinct telling her to run, to get away from the source of sorrow._

_“The other boys won’t let me play with them,” Akihiro said between sobs. Natsumi stroked over the strip of hair (and how strange it was that his hair grew in such a particular way) on his head with trembling fingers, nearly unable to think with the sadness hanging in the air like a miasma._

_“Why not?” she said in a faint voice._

_“They said,” Akihiro sniffed. “They said I had dirty blood.”_

_She should have known this day would come – she and Akihira both should have  seen it coming. Akihiro was mixed race; he might’ve passed for a Japanese child, had his eyes not been such a startling shade of blue, but it was not to be, and now the recognition of his differences by his peers - and the subsequent marginalisation at their hands - had begun._

_There had long been whisperings amongst the neighbours – speculation as to the origins of Akihira and Natsumi’s ‘blessing’. The nicer rumours had told of their finding and bringing the child in out of the goodness of their hearts, despite his being the likely result of a less than favourable union between an American soldier and some impressionable girl or whore. Less kindly gossip had people speculating that Natsumi herself had had an affair with one of the white invaders, and poor, pushover Akihira was too good to get rid of his lecherous wife or the mongrel child her actions had brought into the world (and what poisonous rot, Natsumi thought when such hearsay got back to her, for she had never shown signs of pregnancy, nor, it seemed, would she ever)._

_Natsumi closed her eyes tight, kept taking deep steadying breaths, but every inhalation dragged the sorrow further into her, made it seep into her very bones. She needed to placate the boy as quickly as possible, to lift his mood so that this deep feeling of grief might also lift._

_“They were only being unkind, Akihiro,” she soothed, holding the boy close, letting out a little sigh of relief as the sadness lifts slightly, almost imperceptibly._

_Akihiro whimpers. “But what did they mean? Why would they say I had dirty blood?”_

_“They don’t understand what they’re saying, Akihiro,” Natsumi said. “Don’t dwell on it. Why don’t you go spend some time by the stream? See how many fishes you can spot?”_

_Akihiro was silent for a while, and Natsumi’s mind lurched as the feeling of sorrow in her intensified once more._

_“Okay,” he agreed eventually – and though he was still tearful, he moved away, heading back outside. The choking sadness dissipated as he moved away, and Natsumi found herself gasping for air, as if her very surroundings had been tainted with misery by the boy’s presence._

_“Akihiro?”_

_The boy paused at the door, wiping his eyes quietly._

_“Don’t tell your father about this,” Natsumi advised, not wishing to relive the experience again when Akihira returned home. “It’ll only upset him.”_

_Akihiro looked at his feet, frowned a little, but finally conceded with another quiet “okay” before leaving the house._

_Natsumi ran a hand over her face. Surely no mother should fear the moods of her child in such a way? Or, perhaps, she had just never been suitable mother material in the first place. Perhaps that was why she had struggled to conceive – the fault was all her own, in her very nature._

_There was one thing Natsumi knew for sure._

_She couldn’t live like this._

*

Occasionally, Laura worries that she has made a mistake letting Daken into her life, especially now that she has a child. Despite all he has done for her and Scott since Sarah’s birth, Laura knows that her brother still exercises his capacity for cruelty when he thinks she won’t find out – but sometimes he will bump into another super by accident on a killing spree, and word will get back to Laura – and though Laura has enough power over him to dissuade him from such acts, his inbuilt urge to hurt and destroy just keeps resurfacing. When Laura does get word of recent acts of brutality from Daken, she is reminded of how he has hurt her, hurt their father and countless others in the past, remembers what a vicious and efficient executioner he can be with the right incentive, and she wonders if he is really someone she wants to have around her young daughter.

But then Daken will visit again, and Laura’s worries fade as she watches her half-brother play with her two year old daughter; he allows himself to be led around the house, Sarah gripping his little finger and guiding him aimlessly from room to room; he patiently sits and lets Sarah use him as a climbing frame, not even wincing if she pulls too hard on his hair, or pokes him in the eyes as she clambers over him; he reads to her, despite Scott and Laura’s giggling over Sarah forcing big, scary Daken to read such classics as ‘The Hungry Caterpillar’ over and over again.

Once, Laura worried that Daken was incapable of experiencing love – real, honest love – but she knows now that that cannot be true. Her brother’s adoration for Sarah is near instinctive; should she will hurt herself or just become upset over something, Daken responds by unconsciously emitting soothing pheromones and falls over himself trying to comfort her.

Daken’s never-ending concern about Sarah’s wellbeing often continues when she isn’t even present. One afternoon, he and Laura sit opposite one another at the little dining table in the living room, alone together in the apartment for a while whilst Scott takes Sarah to the doctor’s for a quick check-up. They are chatting, as they often do, about recent goings-on in their lives, when the conversation suddenly turns to Sarah.

 “Sarah _is_ going to be homeschooled when she gets older, isn’t she?”

Laura gives Daken a questioning look, but he offers no explanation for his bringing up the subject.

“We have not decided yet,” Laura shrugs eventually. “But I would like her to go to a normal school whilst she’s little.”

“You can’t be serious,” Daken says. He avoids Laura’s eyes, looks down at his untouched tea. “You and Scott are mutants. She’ll be treated differently.”

“I doubt the other children will pick up on our being mutants,” Laura says. “I’d like her to grow up amongst children her own age. It will be good for her social skills.”

“She could be a target for anti-mutant activists,” Daken says stubbornly.

“We will have measures in place to assure her safety and protect her identity. We already have a place in mind – a school with some links to other superpowered individual. I think she will be okay there.”

Daken huffs a little and looks away. Laura raises an eyebrow.

“Why are you so worried about her going to school? She will not be attending for a few years yet.”

No response.

“Daken?”

He is staring hard at the floor, and, after a while, he opens his mouth as if he’s going to say something, but then he shuts it and shakes his head.

“It’s nothing,” he says, still not making eye contact with his sister, and then the front door goes, and Scott and Sarah come in, so Laura loses the chance to dig deeper into Daken’s odd concerns.

She figures he’ll tell her if and when he’s ready.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't tell you how much trouble I had with this chapter - it may well go under some serious editing if I get the time. Updates might be a bit slower from here on in, as uni's starting up again, but I've got the story all planned and plotted out now, so I know where I'm going!
> 
> I've always wondered what Daken would've been like as a younger kid (a lot of the headcanons I've seen vary wildly, which is pretty cool to see!). I imagine he would've naturally been a bit of a brat, but I never bought the completely-vicious-by-nature kid Williams presented us with in the 'Wolverine: Father' comic - I like to think that he started out okay, but that the years of relentless bullying just seriously eroded any and all empathy he had into nothing, and then Romulus just built on that.
> 
> Anyway, coming up next time (unless I change my mind again): Daken runs into Mystique during a shambolic mission.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woo, new chapter! I redid this one several times, and I'm still not entirely happy with it, but eh, such is writing.
> 
> Warnings for: discussion of past rape.

There’s too much blood.

He’s in a secretive facility in South America, retrieving some documents relevant to his… interests, as it were. There’s been bloodshed, of course – the material he’s after was protected quite fiercly by the place’s guards – but Daken’s not used to spilling so much of his own.

It’s pouring from a knife-wound, begotten in Daken’s failure to ensure that all of the guards were well and truly dead. The man got him good, left him with a long, clean slice along his ribcage, before Daken had properly dispatched him, and now blood is oozing from the cut in a continuous, gleaming red stream. The hand he’s holding over it is drenched crimson, and the white fabric around his middle is stained with the damn stuff.

Damn the Heat pills, damn this mission, damn _everything._

Daken staggers towards the exit, counting _one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four._ He can work through pain – he knows pain, knows it intimately – but he’s woozy with the loss of blood, and it’s only sheer determination, the knowledge that he has the material he needs in the briefcase he’s clutching in the hand that isn’t vainly holding his side together, that’s keeping him going.

_One, two, three, four…_

If he can get to the jet, he can grab the emergency teleporting device he tricked Johnny into procuring for him (and Daken curses himself and his arrogance for not bringing the little device with him into the facility), can use it and hope the experimental technology does its job properly and doesn't drop him in the middle of the Pacific ocean, or something. 

_One, two, three, four…_

A few more meters, that’s all.

There is the click of a gun being cocked.

Daken falters. Impossible. He killed all the agents, he made sure of it.

He turns to snarl at his would-be assailant, only to find himself looking at an old ally, of sorts.

Mystique.

“Hello, Daken,” she says pleasantly, gun aimed squarely at Daken’s head.

“Mystique,” he answers through gritted teeth, straightening as much as the laceration will allow and grimacing at the pain the small movement sends lancing through his nervous system. Were he not so distracted by his injury, he might’ve caught her scent and avoided her completely – but here she is, and now he has no choice but to deal with her and get away without dying.

Mystique raises an eyebrow.

“You’re in a bad way, aren’t you?” - she nods at his side, blood still pouring impressively out of the cut – “Healing factor letting you down?”

Daken remains taciturn, scowling hatefully. Through fuzzy vision, he sees that her gun is still trained on his head. Mystique’s a good shot. She could kill him.

“Come on, Daken, don’t play games with me,” she says, advancing on him with the slow, easy gait of a predator moving in on doomed prey. “Those are the documents, aren’t they? I understand why you want them, but don’t you think they’re a little… irrelevant to you, now that you spend all your time signing paperwork in Madripoor?”

Daken chuckles, though doing so sends agony pulsing through his body. “If you think that’s all I’m doing nowadays, you’ve been wildly misinformed.” She’s close now, he notes, about three feet away – in prime range of his pheromones.

“Oh, do tell me more,” Mystique purrs, stopping close enough that the end of the gun she’s holding is a mere inch from his forehead. Carefully, Daken starts sending out appeasing pheromones – if he’s going to get out of this alive, he needs her on his side, if only temporarily.

“I’d love to,” Daken rumbles, leaning forwards to press his head against the cold muzzle of the gun. He looks at her from beneath long eyelashes, his lips parted slightly, and she’s glancing between his face and the briefcase; he increases his pheromone output and leans into the gun, lets out a whimper that isn’t entirely faked. “But I really am losing quite a lot of blood.”

Mystique bites her lower lip, then clenches her teeth, and for a moment, Daken’s sure she’s going to pistol whip him, take the briefcase and leave him to bleed out metres from the exit of the base – but she lowers the weapon and her free hand ghosts through Daken’s hair.

“How far away is your transport?” she asks softly.

“A five minute walk,” Daken replies, and he’d love to be relieved about the pheromones having done their job, but his head is spinning, and he quite desperately needs to lie down –

His knees buckle and Mystique catches him, hefts him up into her arms and makes for the exit.

“Can’t have you dying on me,” she says. “But don’t think I’m letting you walk away with those documents once we’re done.”

*

Remarkably, Daken retains his grip on consciousness, is just about still awake and pumping out pheromones when Mystique finds his cloaked jet and hauls him into it. She puts him on the floor, slides the briefcase a few feet away from him, then rummages through the first aid kit onboard, cuts the costume around the injury away and rinses the blood off of the surrounding skin. Daken hisses when she sprays the long cut with anti-septic, the dull thrum of pain replaced by acute stinging.

“Why didn’t you just send some of your agents in on this mission?” she asks as she starts to sew his side up.

“A man has to get his kicks somewhere,” he says, grimacing as she threads him back together. “And I’m sure you understand my investment in the files we’re both here to recover.  Work like this is best handled personally.”

“Well, look where that attitude’s gotten you,” Mystique says with a wry quirk of her brow. “What’s wrong with your healing factor, anyway?”

“It’s been faulty ever since L.A.”

“It’s still not better?”

“Why should it be?” Daken asks. “It might’ve gotten better if it weren’t for you and Sabretooth messing things up for me.”

Mystique stops sewing and sits back to glare at him.

“It was your own doing, Daken,” she snaps, but she won’t make eye contact with him.

“Is that so?” Daken says, and he’s been waiting for this for a long time, is glad to see that she still feels some degree of guilt over what happened, glad to see that she can’t even look him in the eye (even if he does wish she’d finish what she started with his now half-open wound). “I asked Sabretooth to ply me with drugs and convince me to carry out a thoroughly stupid plan to kill Wolverine, did I?”

Daken’s still woozy from blood loss, still not thinking entirely coherent thoughts, but he’s wanted to get this out of his system for so long that the repressed anger overrides everything else, even wards off the threat of losing consciousness for now.

“I didn’t know he was doing any of that,” Mystique mutters. She resumes sewing the cut up, but she’s being rougher now, thread tugging hard at Daken’s skin with every pull.

“Of course you did,” Daken growls. “You provided him with the damn drugs, you’re the one who got them into production. What were they, Mystique? Altered Heat pills?”

Mystique curls her top lip, bares her teeth in a snarl, and Daken realises that he’s probably projecting his feelings into his pheromone output.

“They were, weren’t they? Heat pills, altered so that they enhanced the healing factor instead of ruining it. Altered to make the taker pliable and suggestible – not just to that lunatic, Roston, but to anyone.”

“Yes,” she snaps. “And I wouldn’t have have gone along with it if you’d just cooperated like you’d agreed to in the first place.”

“I would’ve quite happily cooperated if all your plans hadn’t been so God-awful,” he says, reigning his pheromones back in to prevent any physical aggression from Mystique – they can get fight if and when he heals, not before.

“It was better than anything you were up to at the time,” says Mystique, who has thankfully returned to using a more sensible sewing technique. The wound’s nearly shut now, but that’ll mean nothing if his healing factor doesn’t return soon and replenish all the blood he’s lost. “We took you out of that meaningless little life you were living in Trinidad –“

“It was a vacation.”

“- after that bombing stunt in New York. We gave you purpose again. If you hadn’t started acting up, Victor wouldn’t have had to give you that extra push with the drugs.”

“I’m sorry, ‘extra push’? I was perfectly happy to make Wolverine’s life a living hell – it just so happened that your visions for making his life that little bit worse didn’t line up with mine. Anyway, as you can see, the pills you gave me didn’t _really_ fix the healing factor – all they’ve really done in the long-term is make it horribly unreliable should I sustain any injuries.”

Mystique is stiff lipped as she finishes dressing the cut, so Daken continues, in a tone all at once accusing and casually conversational:

“Did you ever see the videos Creed made? The ones he made of him raping me whilst I was hopped up on the drugs you made to control me?” He’s got his pheromones back at the level where they’re encouraging guilt in Mystique, but he hardly needs to use them to twist the knife when it comes to this point. He knows she saw the recordings, remembers hearing her chew Sabretooth out for his actions, just days before everything had gone to hell. Mystique closes her eyes, pinches the bridge of her nose, takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. Her jaw is tight. “I mean, Romulus let him have his fun with me back in the day, but at least I was conscious enough to resist back then - mentally, if not always physically. Those pills turned me into nought but a compliant little doll for him to play with.”

“Daken,” Mystique says, running a hand over her face – and she’s shaking, Daken notices with some satisfaction. “I _never_ intended for him to do that to you-“

“Perhaps you should’ve kept him on a tighter leash, then. Really, it was a good play, at the end of the day. He knew Logan would be just _devastated_ to see his precious little psychopath be defiled on camera by his most hated enemy. Creed making me call him ‘daddy’ whilst he fucked me was a nice touch, don’t you think?”

“If I’d known-“

“Well, you didn’t, did you?” Daken spits, staggering onto his feet and immediately regretting it as pain blossoms up his side. He shakes his head to try and clear his swimming vision, leans against the pilots chair to regain his composure. “What’s more, even when you saw what he did to me, you kept working with him. Hell, you still work with him, even now!”

“Creed’s never been an angel,” Mystique hisses, though she has turned away from Daken and has a hand pressed against her eyes. Daken takes advantage of her not looking at him, gropes into the pocket of the pilot chair for something. “Do you think I don’t know I’m working with a serial rapist and murderer on a regular basis? For goodness sake, look at _yourself_ , Daken! As far as atrocities go, you’re no better than he is! If I dropped a plan every time a teammate did something abhorrent, let me tell you, I would get _nothing_ done. It doesn’t mean I like it. And I’m sorry.”

“Are you, though? Are you really?”

“Yes,” Mystique says resolutely, turning to face him with eyes a little brighter than Daken is used to seeing them. “If I could change what he did to you, I would. But that’s outside my power, so all I can offer now are my apologies.”

“Well…”

“Well what?”

“If you wanted to make up for it in a more meaningful way, you could set the autopilot on this thing back up to take me to Madripoor?”

Daken’s grip on the chair slackens and he slumps uselessly to the floor, whimpering softly.

“I’m not counting on being conscious for much longer, to tell the truth,” he smiles weakly. Mystique hesitates, looks between the controls and the briefcase, but then a strong sense of obligation comes over her, and Daken is limp on the floor, breathing laboured and shallow, evidently having wasted the last of his energy on his tirade, so she figures he won’t be getting far from her even if he does get a hold of the documents at this point.

She moves over to the control panel, and starts powering up the jet, when she hears a couple of thuds behind her. Mystique whips around to see Daken on the floor, several feet away from where he’d been moments ago, with the briefcase under one arm, a little device held aloft in his other hand.

“Well, it’s been wonderful catching up and reminiscing, Mystique, but I’m afraid this is where we part,” he grins. Mystique snarls and her hand goes for her gun. “Until next time!”

She shoots but Daken is gone, having clicked the button on the device and teleported off to god knows where. Mystique bellows furiously and curses herself for making the fatal mistake of failing to shift her olfactory system into obsoletion in the presence of a pheromone manipulator.

*

The teleporter works perfectly, drops Daken off in his Madripoor office like he programmed it to, and his last thought before passing out is that he really must thank Johnny for providing it by offering him some seriously good head next time they meet.

He awakens hours later to the sound of his mobile blaring, and is happy to find that his healing factor has returned; the only thing that remains of the wound are the stitches, but he’ll remove those once he’s answered this call and put the documents into his safe.

Daken grabs his phone and smiles to see that Laura is the one calling.

“Hello, Laura,” he greets chirpily.

“Hello, Daken,” she greets back, a little suspiciously. “What have you done? You sound very… pleased with yourself.”

“I’m just having a good day, that’s all,” says Daken, and he is quite unable to keep the self-satisfied grin out of his voice – he does love it when a plan comes together.

“I’m sure,” Laura says drily, but she doesn’t dwell; when she speaks again, her tone is lighter. “I was just calling to ask when you would next be in New York? Sarah has been asking after you.”

“She has?”

“Quite often, especially when she goes through her dinosaur books,” Laura says fondly. “She stops on the raptors and asks where you are, then sulks when we tell her you are busy.”

Sarah, now an inquisitive three year old toddler, is quite insistent that the deinonychus in one of her dinosaur books looks like Daken, due to its being portrayed with a crest of black feathers not dissimilar to Daken’s mohawk.

“I suppose I can make room in my schedule for a visit. Are you free at all next week?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You haven't seen the last of the mysterious ~briefcase documents~, mark my words.
> 
> I may or may not be writing another fic based on the events I talk about having transpired between Sabretooth and Daken in this chapter.
> 
> This story has become hella convoluted (and long, look at that estimated chapter count, jfc) in my plans, but it's all leading somewhere, I promise!
> 
> Next time: Daken and Laura discuss names, family and the future~


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An update, at last! I had a crazy amount of trouble writing this chapter - ended up rewriting it several times, and it's somehow ended up being about twice as long as I ever intended it to be. Updates will hopefully be more regular after the next chapter, as I've not had so much trouble with the rough drafts I've got written after that point~
> 
> Apologies for the writing style of this story jumping about a bit - I'm really still getting back into it after years of doing very little!

“Unky Aki!”

Daken is no longer ‘Daken’ to Sarah.

Laura expressed her discomfort with Sarah calling him thus a few months ago, during one of their outings to Daken’s favourite teahouse. Their meetings here were growing ever rarer, what with Sarah insisting on seeing her uncle as often as possible, but they still managed to get out every once in a while.

“Daken is my name,” Daken had shrugged when Laura brought it up. “She can already say it, and everyone else calls me by it. It’d only confuse her to know me as anything else.”

“I don’t know,” Laura had sighed. “There is a lot of… negativity surrounding your name. Wouldn’t you rather she called you by your other name?”

Daken bristled. “For all intents and purposes, I don’t _have_ another name,” he’d said. As far as Daken was concerned, that was no lie; his other name had been ripped from him, reclaimed by the father he’d indirectly killed. The other name hadn’t been his name for years. “But if I _did_ , that name would far more negativity attached to it than my chosen moniker does.”

Laura had looked at him curiously and Daken had sighed.

“Akihiro…” he’d said, and he’d grimaced a little, because the name felt all wrong in his mouth. “That’s the ‘other name’ you’re talking about, isn’t it?”

“That is correct.”

“Things ended very badly between me and the people that gave me that name.”

“Oh?”

“I’d rather not talk about it in detail.”

The two fell into silence for a while.

“How about an abbreviation of that name?” Laura suggested after some time.

“Why can’t she just call me Daken like everyone else?” Daken whined.

“I am not keen on the idea of her knowing you by a name she may come to find out is a slur,” Laura said. “It would be like her calling me X-23.”

“You’re her mom, I’m her uncle, those are very different things,” Daken grumbled.

“True. But she is very fond of you.”

“I just don’t see why it’s so important.”

“Why did you take the name Daken?” Laura asked. Daken groaned and slumped in his chair.

“We’re not _seriously_ doing the name psychoanalysis thing, are we?”

“Not necessarily. But I am curious.”

Daken rolled his eyes, but he liked Laura, so he indulged her.

“Well, I certainly wasn’t going to use my other name after what transpired between my first… family… and I. Everyone around me called me ‘daken’, anyway. Thought if that was what I was going to be known as it pre-emptively, I might as well own it.”

He didn’t mention how Romulus had used the name relentlessly to remind him of what his place in the world would have been if it weren’t for his oh so _generously_ taking Daken in. If he hadn’t accepted Daken as his name before (and he had come close), he certainly had after a few weeks under Romulus’ treatment.

“How about just ‘Aki’?” Laura said after a short pause.

Daken sighed, exasperated. “Why are you insisting on this?”

Laura sat back in her chair. “I did not have a name until I was thirteen. I was X-23 until my mother named me with her dying breath. I think there is… something significant in the names we choose to go by, as well as the names we are given by others,” Laura looked at Daken, who was stirring his tea with an unreadable expression. “When I was X-23, I was a weapon. That name only made that more so by dehumanising me; ‘real’ people had names, whereas I had a number. When my mother named me Laura, gave me her last name, she gave me humanity. She gave me history, family – ties to things outside the Facility. In time, I came to recognise myself as something more than a weapon. My mother enabled my abuse – she did not do right by me for much of my life, not really – but she also gave me something that helped me undo the work of those that would have me see myself as less than human.”

Laura reached over the table to brush her hand gently against Daken’s. He did not pull away.

“I understand that you have made the name ‘Daken’ into something that gives you power over people that might hurt you. But not everyone is an enemy. All I am suggesting is that Sarah calling you something other than ‘Daken’ could be a positive step away from the negativity of the past.”

Daken sighed heavily. As far as he was concerned, Laura was just over thinking things – everyone else would know him as Daken, just as everyone besides Akihira and Natsumi had known him as Daken decades before – but it was something she seemed quite invested in, and no one had ever called him ‘Aki’ in the past, anyway.

“Fine,” he’d said. “She can call me Aki.”

Laura smiled at him. “It is a nice name. It means autumn, if I am not mistaken?” Laura was quite fluent in Japanese, having learnt it from a young age, but some of the nuances had slipped in the years spent speaking it sporadically rather than regularly.

“That’s correct, though it can also mean sparkle,” Daken said flatly.

“Uncle Sparkle,” Laura’s smile widened into an amused grin, and Daken couldn’t help but mimic the expression. “Cute.”

They both returned to sipping their cooling drinks, but after a few minutes, Daken spoke again:

“One condition to the name change.”

“Hm?”

“No one but Sarah gets to call me that. I certainly don’t want Logan addressing me as Aki in the next apologetic voicemail he sends me.”

Laura nodded. It went unspoken that ‘no one’ didn’t actually include her – Daken often applies rules to the population as a whole that Laura finds he doesn’t hold her to in practice - but she understood the implication, the suggestion that he would allow her to call him Aki, but would prefer she kept calling him Daken. Though somewhat puzzled by the reasoning behind it, she would respect his wishes.

In the present, Sarah is resolutely scaling Mount Aki, using her uncle’s hair to tug herself up onto his shoulders – it looks pretty painful from where Laura, Scott and Jubilee are sat. They’re at the table across the room, watching ‘Kids Corner’, as they have secretly dubbed the sofa currently occupied by Daken, Shogo and Sarah. Jubilee keeps throwing nervous looks at Daken, worried that his patience might snap at any moment, and she’s ready to jump up and blast him through the wall if he pops his claws anywhere near her son – but she notes that Laura and Scott are quite unconcerned with the way Sarah is using the super-villain as a climbing frame, so she does her best to focus on the conversation and relax.

On the sofa, Daken is doing an admirable job of juggling alternate conversations with Sarah and Shogo, plus tapping commands into his Nintendo 4DS to ensure he doesn’t lose another Pokémon battle to Shogo, all on top of making sure Sarah doesn’t fall off of him.

Kids are hard work.

“Unky Aki! That one!” Sarah instructs, pointing at an attack command on the lower screen of Daken’s handheld. She’s returned to his lap for now, apparently having tired of clinging to his hair and shoulders, and Daken whimpers when she jabs the attack button on the touchscreen. His Pokémon succeeds in using a move that has no effect on Shogo’s monster, and Shogo smirks triumphantly as he beats Daken for a third time.

Sarah beams up at her uncle. “We win!” she says, clapping her hands. “We win!”

“Yes, Sarah, we win,” Daken says with a sigh, knowing that she will vehemently disagree if he corrects her and tells her they actually lost (again). He’s tried over and over to teach her to press the buttons he shows her, but that seems to make the three and a half year old more insistent on picking any command other than the one he’s pointing at; Laura says he should praise her for it because it’ll encourage ‘independence’, or something, so he puts on a brave face and says: “Good job!” 

He’d sulk about losing to a twelve year old three times in a row, but, between Sarah delightedly throwing her arms around his neck to celebrate their ‘victory’ and the approving smile Laura’s throwing his way, it’s hard to be too despondent.

“We could try a handicap match?” Shogo suggests, still grinning. “You use six Pokémon, I’ll use three?”

“Very funny,” Daken says drily.

“Hide seek!” Sarah insists, smacking Daken hard in the eye to get her point across. “Hide seek!”

Daken rubs his eye, because _ow_ , that had actually hurt a fair bit. Laura always tells him that he should discipline Sarah when she hits, bites or otherwise mauls him, but any subsequent crying from Sarah when she’s told ‘no’ or ignored briefly sets Daken’s pheromones off and causes him a sort of weird emotional distress which he’d probably recognise as basic empathy if he’d had any prior experience with such feelings. As such, he lets Sarah get her way pretty much all the time, provided Laura’s not keeping a close eye on them – and so, on this occasion, Sarah gets her game of hide ‘n’ seek, and Shogo gets dragged into it as well.

*

After a couple of hours spent clambering over Daken and forcing he and Shogo to play increasingly repetitive games of hide and seek with her, Sarah has conked out, and Laura takes her to her room to have a proper nap. Shogo and Daken have returned to the sofa and their casual conversing over games of Pokémon.

Shogo likes talking to Daken. He’s aware of Daken’s reputation – ‘murderous egomaniac wannabe-tyrant’ is, from what Shogo’s heard, the basis gist of it, and that’d be enough to deter him from ever going near the guy if he wasn’t such a great listener. Shogo seldom gets the chance to talk about his projects at length with anyone who isn’t involved in them – his schoolmates are hopeless, and his mom tries, but her eyes usually glaze over after about five minutes of technical terms and convoluted equations. The best thing about Daken is that he doesn’t just _listen_ : he engages. He asks questions, makes suggestions, expresses approval and never gives any impression that he’s growing tired of Shogo’s babble, so, really, it’s hard for Shogo to pass up the opportunity to just talk until such time as he has to leave.

Sometimes Shogo catches his mom looking at him and shaking her head after he says something, and he’ll remember what she told him about not revealing any information to Daken that he wouldn’t reveal if he were talking to a potential enemy. Shogo doesn’t think he does it _that_ much; sure, he accidentally told Daken the exploits in the newest Jean Grey School security system that one time, because he was just _that_ offended that the errors existed, and sure, in another instance, he revealed that Wolverine had accidentally injured a student during one of his feral rages – but Shogo figures he always checks himself and diverts to other topics pretty quickly. Besides, Daken never looks any more or less interested in those topics than he does at any other time that Shogo’s speaking, and he never presses for more details or leads the conversation back that way, so what can the harm be?

As it happened, his relative innocence when it comes to dealing with villains is an asset to Daken.

In the few times they’ve met, Daken’s learnt how to appeal to Shogo quite effectively. In doing so, he’s made the kid into a sort of oblivious spy; Shogo gets so involved in talking about life at the Jean Grey School that details that might seem innocent to him just spill out with minimal prodding from Daken. Occasionally, Daken will need to carefully push him in a certain direction when he’s looking for specific details on something – usually gossip about his father or details on up-and-coming mutants that might be suitable for… employment in years to come – but the kid is always blissfully unaware that he’s being manipulated, and for that, Daken is thankful.

Right now, Daken’s letting the conversation flow naturally, and, as he listens to Shogo talk about his newest ideas, all Daken can think is that it’s a pity that someone with so much talent is a slave to such heroic altruism. He could be making millions designing weapons technology with a brain like his – yet, he chooses to put all his energy into projects that’ll make life safer, more comfortable for the average person.

It’s tragic, really.

“I’ve designed a type of forcefield that could be made en-masse, then be owned and used by the average person,” Shogo says, carefully assessing his next move in the latest Pokémon battle he and Daken are having. “Like, the device itself can be tiny – pocket-sized – so people could carry it around with them. It could save people’s lives.”

“You could make a fortune out of something like that,” Daken thinks aloud.

Shogo looks horrified. “I’m not looking to make _money_ out of it! This is something that I want everyone to have access to, not just people who can afford it.”

_Ugh,_ Daken thinks, but he just raises an eyebrow and drawls:

“How noble.”

“The main problem is that I’ve gotta get through school before I can really start worrying about getting my designs realised and mass-produced,” Shogo sighs. “I mean, not to brag, but I’m pretty good at maths and science, and I’m alright when it comes to field work exercises as well. It’s just literature that’s really dragging my grades down.”

“They actually teach you that sort of thing at the Jean Grey School?” Daken asks. He has to make an effort not to yell triumphantly as he sets his Gardevoir up to knock out Shogo’s Garchomp. He’s lost an _embarrassing_ number of battles to the twelve year old today, so any little sign that victory is coming his way is a good deal more exciting than it should be. “Baffling. Well, what element of literature is giving you trouble?”

“Essay writing. And I’m just not all that interested in it, y’know?” Shogo shrugs, but then his face lights up again. “Oh, did I tell you? I got a patent on the body armour I designed!”

“Body armour?” Daken’s mind starts whirring – he _does_ need some precautions in place now that his healing factor’s on the fritz. “Tell me more.”

“I’ve made it to resist pretty much everything: it’s bullet-proof, stab-proof, telekinetic-weapon-proof, waterproof, fireproof and blast-proof,” Shogo says, tapping his Pokémon’s commands in. “It can also make you impervious to psychic attacks, but that only works if it covers your entire body, and that’s not very practical.”

“Lightweight?” Daken asks.

“Duh,” Shogo says, rolling his eyes as if Daken just said something stupid. “It’s more like a morph suit, or spandex than any sort of bulky body armour. You can layer it under things or wear it on its own. Once I’ve got it all sorted out, the X-Men are gonna start using it for their uniforms!”

Daken leans in close. “Are you taking commissions?” he asks quietly.

“Depends,” Shogo looks up from the game to grin at Daken, replies in an equally hushed voice. “What’re you offering?”

“What’re you after?” Daken says, mirroring Shogo’s expression. _This is more like it_ , he thinks, _the kid’s generosity doesn’t extend so far that he’s offering freebies to the less virtuous among us._ “Money? An assured A+ in every literature class you take between now and graduation? A share in Madripoor?”

“I don’t think mom’d let me have a share in a country just yet – but the other two sound good,” Shogo woops as his Scizor lands a critical hit and knocks out Daken’s Gardevoir. “If you can cover the cost of me making it and help me ace literature, we’ve got a deal – oh, but you’ve gotta promise me something?”

Daken nearly laughs. Poor Shogo, believing someone like Daken to be capable of keeping promises, and offering to make something so advanced for so little in return - but this is business, so he’ll have a good chuckle at the expense of the kid’s naivety later. “What?”

“No super-villainy whilst you’re wearing it, yeah?”

Daken smiles and shrugs. “Sure. So-“ -he offers his hand- “- do we have a deal?”

Shogo casts a quick glance at his mother, but she’s animatedly chatting away to Laura, so he reaches over to shake Daken’s hand. “Deal.” Shogo looks back down at the screen of his handheld and grins. “Your Sylveon’s badly poisoned, by the way.”

Daken curses in Japanese.

*

“Maybe you should go into childcare,” Laura teases when Shogo and Jubilee are gone. Daken is sulking on the sofa; Shogo beat him at Pokémon _again_ before he left, and without any tampering from Sarah, so the only response Laura gets from him is an incoherent grumble. “Really, though,” she sits down next to him and squeezes his arm affectionately. “Thank you.”

Daken’s pout lessens somewhat.

A few moments pass between them in comfortable silence.

Laura is the one to break it.

“There is something I wanted to talk to you about,” she says, voice taking a more grave tone. “Something serious.” Dread pricks at Daken’s skin; he’s been anticipating this since the encounter with Mystique last week. There was no way she’d let him get one up on her without telling anyone what he’d done, what he’d taken away from the facility – she’s called the X-Men, Daken thinks, she’s called them and tipped them off and now Laura’s gonna chew me out over it.

He steels himself.

“I trust that you are keeping up with the news?” she says.

Daken just catches the confusion before it shows on his face. This isn’t the direction he was expecting. “I am,” he says, though he’s not sure exactly what’s she’s referring to.

“Then you have seen that anti-mutant sentiment is on the rise again?”

Ah. Of course. Laura, Scott and Jubilee had briefly discussed the prospect a couple of times over the day, but Daken had gleaned nothing he didn’t already know from their conversations.

“I have,” Daken says, quite at ease again now he knows there’s to be no interrogation of his recent actions. This should be a much more straightforward discussion. Frankly, he finds the cyclical nature of human-mutant relations to be utterly droll at this point; just constant struggle interspersed with brief, misleading periods of ‘peace’.

This latest scare was triggered a week ago by a couple of disillusioned mutant youths; the X-Men had never scouted them – with the mutant population growing enormously once again, new mutants are slipping through the net daily – and they’d used their respective, complimentary powers of fire manifestation and gas manipulation and dispersal to detonate their school.

The death toll had been rather impressive, Daken had to admit; five hundred and eighty-one students and teachers killed in the blast (and the footage of the blast had been spectacular, a truly massive explosion – Daken really couldn’t fault the kids for the impression they’d made).

“Then you understand that the foreseeable future will be hard for our kind,” Laura says seriously.

“Especially the less fortunate among us,” Scott adds as he steps into the living room, having left briefly to check up on Sarah.

“Yes, I imagine it will be,” Daken says, absently checking the nails on one hand and making a mental note to get a manicure before he leaves New York.

“We’ve had several reports of hate crimes against outed mutants across America, with a few reports coming in from other countries as well,” Scott presses on, pacing the living room and wringing his hands distractedly. “The Jean Grey School is on lockdown. We’re handling it as best we can right now, but we’ve gone terrorist groups like the Brotherhood complicating things, and the X-Men can’t be everywhere at once. We need some sort of safe haven for the mutants we can’t protect until this blows over.”

_Oh, but it won’t blow over,_ Daken thinks, _you and I know that._ _The Sentinels and legislation won’t be long coming._

Daken found human vs. mutant vaguely entertaining in the past; mutants were superior by nature, always would be, but what humans lacked in fancy powers, they more than made up for in numbers and their propensity for lashing out with more than enough force in the form of technology and rhetoric. Romulus used to pull strings here and there to ensure the struggle was ongoing – he was always rather keen on ‘survival of the fittest’, had been quite invested in maintaining the antagonism to keep the population on its toes. Years ago, when his master had still been around – when he’d still been under the illusion that it was his destiny to inherit Romulus’ empire – Daken had assumed he’d do the same someday.

And perhaps he would’ve had some fun fanning the flames, had this happened a few years ago – as it is, Daken isn’t too eager to contribute towards anything that might harm Laura or Sarah.

“Daken, I will be direct,” says Laura. “We need you to open Madripoor as a temporary sanctuary for mutants.”

Daken raises an eyebrow. “Are you seriously suggesting we move all the defenceless mutants to a small island? I imagine it’d make things very convenient for the government; one nuke and they’d wipe out a good deal of homo superior’s population. Not to mention all my good work.”

“I do not think it will reach that stage, Daken.”

“I’m not keen to take chances,” Daken replies flatly. “And I’m not saying I don’t have pro-mutant legislation in place, but… there aren’t actually many mutants in Madripoor. The human population won’t be eager to welcome the sort of influx you’re talking about.”

“I disagree,” Scott says, and Daken’s eyes narrow a bit; he’s come to like Scott in the way that one comes to begrudgingly enjoy a song they were once indifferent to because their friend always plays it on car journeys, but he has another thing coming if he thinks he has any power over Daken when it comes to his territories. “Think of the economic boom it could bring to Madripoor if you play it right – plenty of new people ready to join the workforce. From what I’ve seen, Madripoor’s employment rates have been pretty stellar since you started doing the place up. Plus, you get a reputation for Madripoor as being a good place to be a mutant, you could attract plenty of tourists, who, of course, bring in revenue. This could be your big break to start shedding Madripoor’s old reputation.”

Scott actually has a fairly good point there. Despite his slowly turning Madripoor around, Daken hasn’t had the time to even start cleaning up the countries reputation, which is going to be a necessity; most of the criminal trading that once formed the basis of Madripoor’s economy has been outlawed, so building up the tourism industry would give the place a big boost.

Laura looks at Daken imploringly. “Please, Daken.”

He never stands a chance against her.

“Fine,” Daken sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’ll start looking into it when I get back to the damn place.”

The concept of actually having to do some semblance of work when he leaves New York is not one that fills Daken with joy; who ever knew running an empire, even one as embarrassingly tiny as his currently is, actually involved so much effort?

Grinning, Scott comes to sit on the arm of the sofa and claps a hand on Daken’s shoulder. Daken’s hands twitch imperceptibly; if it weren’t for Laura being so fond of her husband, Daken would’ve happily rammed a claw through Scott’s forearm for deigning to touch him without his wanting him to.

“I can’t say how grateful I am, Daken,” Scott says, relieved smile still on his face. “How grateful the mutants you’re gonna help will be.”

“If this is as disastrous as Mystique’s attempt at creating a mutant utopia on my turf, I’m not going to be happy,” Daken grumbles, and he supposes, if nothing else, that this’ll be an exercise in his superiority over those who’ve tried this sort of thing before him. He wonders again why Mystique _hasn’t_ told anyone about their chance meeting, but then Sarah starts crying in the other room and all other thoughts go out of his head as he and Laura sit up, alert and worried.

Scott chuckles at their synchronised display of concern, get up to go check on her. “She’s probably just had another nightmare,” he reassures the siblings. “I’ll go get her.”

Neither Laura nor Daken relax until Sarah’s in the room with them, and the three year old chooses to wedge herself between her uncle and her mother, where she promptly falls asleep again.

Daken had never guessed his association with Laura would reach this stage; once, he’d thought he’d always be able to separate himself from her when he the time came to do so, and perhaps, with some discipline, he might’ve managed in the past. Now, with Sarah grasping his hand as she snoozes beside him, he understands that he got in too deep years ago; there will be no escaping his connection with his father’s clone or her young daughter.

For the first time in decades – maybe the first time in his life – Daken cares about something… some _someones_... and the scariest thing to him is that he really doesn’t mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, this is a chapter I'm not happy with - but I'm feeling back on track now it's written, so here's hoping I won't get into such a rut with the rest of the story~
> 
> The meaning(s) of Aki were found via Google, so may very well be incorrect - I'm very bad with other languages, so don't hesitate to let me know if I messed up there!
> 
> Next time: The chapter I promised a month or so ago, in which Daken, Laura and Wolverine team up with Shark-Woman's X-Force squad to investigate a shady Weapon X-style facility.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another update, at last~ I had intended to get this up much sooner, but I kept hitting blocks, and I think it shows in the ups and downs of the writing quality in this chapter. u_u If nothing else, I'm learning a lot about my writing techniques as this goes on!

“We’ll be moving in shortly. Everyone has a rough floor plan of the structure to work off of, but my guess is it’s gonna be riddled with traps, so be on your guard. To reiterate, we’re looking for survivors and evidence that’ll lead us to the people who resumed usage of this place and carried out the experiments. As discussed, lethal force against any sentient life inside is only to be used as an absolute last resort.”

Being given orders by an anthropomorphic shark lady is not how Daken envisioned spending his Saturday, but hey, here he is. Lined up next to Laura, his father, the ex-mutant Prodigy, and, uh, Eyeman, plus being given orders by Shark-Woman, Daken wonders what he possibly did to end up here. Surely even all his years of lying, cheating and killing shouldn’t have earned him a place – however temporary - on what must be the most hit-and-miss X-Force team to ever have existed.

It’s all Laura’s fault. He’d never have insisted on coming along if she’d kept her knowledge of the place to herself. She’d been the one to call him, to tell him that the X-Men had been shown evidence of Weapon X style experimentation taking place in a lab buried deep in a harsh, uninhabited part of Russia. They’d been sent footage, she said, showing dogs and people being experimented on – injected with something that seemed to superficially heal wounds, or else cause horrific tumours to manifest – attempts, apparently, at developing a healing factor serum.

“It seems to be some sort of attempt at restarting the Weapon X programme,” she’d told him a few weeks ago on one of his visits, having managed to pry him away from Sarah for a few minutes so they could talk privately.

“It does sound like it’s along those lines,” Daken agreed. “Have the X-Men ruled anyone out yet?”

“The only person we know it can’t be is Romulus,” Laura said.

“I wouldn’t be so sure this isn’t Romulus’ work,” Daken said cooly. “How many breakouts has the Raft had since he was moved there?”

“He has never been one of the escapees,” Laura said firmly. Daken would’ve gone on and theorised that Romulus was only still in the Raft because that was exactly where he wanted to be for the meantime - for whatever reason – but he bit his tongue. After all, if his theory was correct, that meant Romulus had the means to contact him, but hadn’t.

Fucked up as it was, that didn’t make Daken feel very good about himself. He’d thought several times about contacting his old master himself, but convinced himself every time that it would be a bad move. He had his own life now. He was making it on his own, and damned if he was going to crawl back to be mauled and used by that old fool again.

Still, he couldn’t help but wonder sometimes if it might be easier to slip back into old habits.

“It will be hard to rule anyone else out until we have searched the base,” Laura continued. “I will be joining Shark-Woman’s X-Force squad help to investigate further.”

Daken looked away thoughtfully for a moment, then back to Laura.

“Where did you say the experiments took place?”

Laura recounted the coordinates.

“I know that facility. One of Romulus’ old labs, in fact. I can provide a floor-plan on the condition that I join the team for the mission.”

Laura eyed him suspiciously.

“Why do you want to come along?”

“I have as much connection to Weapon X as you or Logan. It’s in my interest to monitor threats like these personally.”

Laura frowned. “True. But I do not think the team will accept you very willingly-“

“They either accept my help, or I’ll withhold the floor plan and go visit the place by myself. Those are my terms.”

There was a pause. Laura couldn’t understand why Daken wanted to come with them, why he hadn’t just taken the information and visited the place alone, as he’d threatened to do. His reasoning as far as joining the team for the mission seemed too vague – but she hadn’t detected any lie when he claimed to be familiar with the facility, and a floor plan would be useful.

“I will speak to Iara,” she said finally. Daken had nodded impassively, and Laura was sure there was something untold on his part, but then Sarah had started calling for Daken and Laura to return to the game they’d been playing, and so she hadn’t pressed.

Iara, better known as Shark-Woman, had accepted Daken’s request to come along, after some pressing on Laura’s part – and even then, it’d only been because she wanted access to the floor plan and didn’t trust him not to mess with evidence if he went and did any detective work of his own.

Right now, Shark-Woman is regretting that decision.

Daken’s mere presence is irritating in a way she isn’t sure she totally understands. The guy’s a serial killer as it is, but she’d been told that he was at least bearable until he stabbed you in the back, in that ‘charming sociopath’ sort of way – she looks at him now, standing tall with his arms folded and his head tossed back, lip curled slightly in a show of disdain for his temporary teammates, and all she sees is an insufferably arrogant bastard.

But she gulps the loathing down, and gives her orders like a professional X-Force leader should.

“I’m splitting the team up into groups. Wolverine and Prodigy will be going to the West Wing – cells that would have housed those experimented on are there, and that is where any potential survivors are likely to be. It’s also where the computer room is, so I want Prodigy to get into the system and bring back as much data as possible. Eyeman and myself will be heading to the North Wing where documentation is stored – we’ll be collecting any written evidence they may have neglected to destroy,” Shark-Woman glares at Daken, a low growl rumbling in her throat. “Daken, you’re with X-23 because I don’t trust you to be with anyone else.”

Daken looks her up and down with the natural insolence of a man who knows exactly how far boundaries can be pushed. She’s a big mutant - towers over everyone else present whilst she’s in shark form – heavily muscled, with huge, clawed hands and a mouth layered with serrated teeth, their sharp, white ridges cropping grotesquely out of the pink of her exposed gums.

‘Romulus would have had a field day with her,’ Daken thinks, but then he meets her eyes. They’re black – entirely black – glittering with the threat of reprimand in the hazy morning sunlight. Daken’s mind slips, dredging memories of his old master’s black eyes leering down at him with gleeful violence in their depths.

He freezes, almost out of instinct; he just has the presence of mind to be grateful for such a mild reaction. A freeze isn’t nearly as humiliating as a submissive dip of the head or a frightened yelp, after all. Still, the conditioned fear is enough that Daken’s mouth has gone dry, his limbs boneless, and all he can do is wait for the punishment that must surely follow, the beatings and harsh words as retribution for his insubordination -

“Is that clear?”

But that voice is not Romulus’, and Daken returns to the present with a blink and slight shake of his head. Shark-Woman scowls at him with arms folded, tapping one clawed foot in her impatient wait for an answer. Daken curses himself for freezing up, for reacting so irrationally to little more than visual stimuli. He can feel his father looking at him – Logan had recognised the brief disassociation, is probably wondering what the trigger might have been, and Daken wants nothing more than to lunge over and gouge his father’s damn eyes out, give him something to really worry about. As it is, he fights down the urge, observes the fingernails of one hand in an aloof display, and gives Shark-Woman her answer with an impassive shrug.

“Suits me.”

“You two are going to the labs. I want any forensic evidence to be preserved and brought in undamaged. Daken, if you tamper with anything, I _will_ know.”

Daken holds his hands up, though his attempt at feigning bewildered innocence is ruined somewhat by the smarmy smile he’s forced back on his face. Shark-Woman clenches her jaw, flexes her fingers, and she has to remind herself that Daken isn’t fair game until the mission is over.

“Move out.”

*

“Why _is_ Daken still a free man?”

Logan scowls. The last thing he wants to discuss as he and Prodigy move through the silent corridors is the son that still reviles and hates him. He doesn’t reply to David’s question, just keeps walking and hopes the man will have the sense to drop it - but Prodigy goes on:

“I know he’s your son, but I’ve checked the guy’s files. He’s a murderer. A horrendously unrepentant murderer, at that.”

“You think I don’t know that, kid?” Logan says.

“’Kid?’” Prodigy frowns. “I’m nearly thirty, Wolverine, don’t infantilise me. And what, Daken gets a free pass ‘cause he’s related to you? Y’know, this sort of hypocrisy is exactly the reason I only freelance with the X-Men these days –“

“We’re not discussing this here,” Logan growls. “Just drop it.”

Logan knows his son is a murderer – hell, the boy seems to have taken all his own worst qualities and magnified them, so how can he not – but he can’t bring himself to give up on the boy.

Not again.

Secretly, he’d hoped that the Life Seed he’d used to resurrect Daken, to drag him out of his phase as a Horseman of Death, might’ve had the same effect as it’d had on Warren; what he wouldn’t do to have a blank slate to work with, to start anew without Romulus’ conditioning or any bad blood between them getting in the way. It had always been a vain, selfish hope. The Daken he brought back was the same bright, vicious man Logan remembered from their first meeting – closer in personality, tone and posture to the man Logan knew before the trouble with X-Force and the Brotherhood. Logan had put the addled nature of his son’s behaviour during that fateful mission down to his substance abuse, assuming he’d not had the strength of will to stop taking those damn drugs he’d forced down everyone’s throats when he’d terrorised New York. It had been disturbing to listen to Daken slur his oddly chosen words, to watch him knock back an entire bottle of whiskey and appear thoroughly confused by his own statements and confessions moments after they left his mouth – but Logan had had enough of pussyfooting around his son by then, his patience having long worn thin, and he’d eventually been left with no choice but to drown the boy and put a stop to the madness once and for all.

_It was the only way,_ he’d told himself over and over. Some days he’d even convince himself that there was some truth in that.

Daken hadn’t stuck around long after he’d come back to life. Logan tried desperately to talk to him, to apologise and build bridges, but Daken wouldn’t have any of it, apparently desiring nothing more than to put a lot of distance between them both as quickly as possible. Logan let him. After all, what hope could there be for their relationship now, if Daken was back to his old self _and_ retained the memories of his death at Logan’s hands? What hope could there be for Daken, who would surely be more embittered and vengeful than ever before?

Still, Logan dares to think that there might be hope yet for his son.

The kid _has_ improved, after all, even if the change isn’t as dramatic as Logan might’ve wished for. Daken hasn’t sought revenge on his father at all – not in any conventional way, at least. There’s the occasional cold-hearted prank or barbed word designed to guilt Logan in the worst way, but it seems otherwise that Daken’s desire for revenge has run cold. It seems, too, that he’s learning, slowly but surely, to interact with certain people beyond the superficial level that is his default. Daken and Laura have been thick as thieves for years now; Logan’d been suspicious at first, thought for sure that Daken was using her as he used everyone, but the time has passed and Daken has proved over and over that he’s happy as long as Laura is happy. Logan isn’t sure what to make of their bond – isn’t sure he wants to analyse it too deeply, knowing what he knows about Daken’s desperate need for the approval of a single, strong leader in his life – but it seems to be doing wonders for both of them, so he doesn’t interfere.

He’s even more amazed by Daken’s behaviour around Sarah. Never would he have dared to imagine that Daken would be safe around a kid – let alone a kid related to _him_ , the father he despises– but the impossible has happened, it seems, and his murderer of a son is besotted with Laura’s daughter. On the rare occasion he gets to see Sarah and Daken together, Logan is struck by how much his son’s mannerisms resemble Itsu’s when he’s around the child; the softness of his expressions, the quiet way he moves, the gentle lull of his voice. Daken’s always taken after his mother as far as looks are concerned, but to see him come so close to her in other ways, the ways that really matter, makes Logan’s heart ache. It makes it all the more painful when Daken aims a harsh word his way or sees Logan watching him and curls his lip in an ugly snarl at the father who let him down.

Logan sighs. Maybe he’ll get a chance to talk to his son when the mission’s over?

He won’t hold his breath.

*

“Why do you do it?”

Daken looks over his shoulder at Laura. They’re moving through the building’s narrow corridors, Daken leading the way by virtue of his familiarity with the place. Laura’s question echoes insistently off the cold metal walls.

“Why do I do what?” he asks, genuinely not sure what she’s referring to – they’ve been separate from the rest of the team for several minutes, travelling in silence.

“Why do you upset people on purpose?”

Ah. Daken turns to look ahead again with a shrug.

“Entertainment, mostly,” he says. “Helps ward the boredom off, however briefly.”

“Shark-Woman is not someone you want as an enemy, Daken,” Laura says, and Daken doesn’t have to look to know that she’s giving him one of her disapproving frowns. “If you push her too far, she may hurt you.”

“That doesn’t sound very super,” Daken deflects. “You X-Men have some terribly dangerous mutants in your ranks, don’t you think?”

“Do not change the subject.”

“Just saying.”

“You should be taking this more seriously. If the Weapon X program is being revived, you may become a target.”

“Perhaps,” Daken says lightly, voice lacking any real concern. Laura sighs, and the two continue until they reach the door into the labs.

*

Shark-Woman and Eyeman are en route to the North Wing. Iara is stomping ahead, occasionally slowing to properly analyse a scent (or attempt to, at least – all the smells in the place seem to warp and become strangely non-specific when she tries to chase them), sometimes coming to a halt to allow Trevor to catch up. He’s going a little slower, doing his job and looking for any indicator of who they might be dealing with, any little detail that might lead them to the perpetrators of the atrocities.

He’s got enough eyes that he can keep a couple on Iara. The tense way she’s holding herself, the constant working of her jaw and clenching of her hands indictate that she’s feeling a little more edgy than is usual even for her.

“Penny for your thoughts, Iara?”

“Shark-Woman. It’s Shark-Woman on missions.”

 “Alright,” Eyeman replies, rolling all his eyes at once. “Penny for your thoughts, _Shark-Woman_?”

“Don’t know what you mean. I’m fine _._ ”

“No, you’re not. Don’t need a gift like mine to see how strung out you are. Is this because of Daken?”

Shark-Woman flexes her fingers and gnashes her teeth.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Look, I know he’s irritating, and having someone like him on the team, even temporarily, isn’t great for our image, but he’s the only one who knows this place – the only one who might know some of the people who were using it.”

“That’s exactly what I’m worried about. C’mon, Eyeman. What do we know about Daken?”

A few moments silence pass, then Shark-Woman clears her throat and Eyeman blinks and says:

“Oh, you were actually asking. Well, uh, he’s a serial killer, sociopath, former assassin and mercenary. Owns Madripoor, and has some uncertain connections to a few small island territories that were recently the subjects of sudden takeovers. Bombed New York once. Was a major player in the kidnap and torture of Genesis. Briefly a Horseman of Death. Want me to go on?”

“No. That’s enough to get my point across, I think. We can’t trust him.”

“Laura seems to.”

Shark-Woman grunts. “Is that surprising? From what I can tell, Wolverine’s not had the balls to so much as shout at the creep since the whole drowning-Horseman-resurrection fiasco. Maybe being soft on him just runs in the family? The fact X-23 leaves him to babysit her kid sometimes like some sorta rabid nanny dog should say it all – that’s some irresponsible parenting if ever I heard of any.”

“Iara –“

“Shark-Woman. And no, I’m not retracting that last statement. One day, she’s gonna go home to find she’s got no kid left. Or, if she’s lucky, she’ll just wind up with a kid with some serious, serious issues. Whatever. That’s on her. What I’m getting at is that Daken is the last person we need around on sensitive missions like this – the last person we need around _period_. Hell, how do we know he’s not invested in this place somehow?”

“A good point. This _could_ be a ruse, an attempt to cover his own tracks by feigning ignorance and pretending to help with the problem.”

“Next time we see him, I want you to pay special attention to him. Find the lie.”

“And if… _when_ I do? What then?”

“Leave that to me.”

*

The labs are frustratingly devoid of any evidence; the experiment tables are covered lightly with dust and cobwebs; scalpels and other such tools are arranged neatly on shelves and in racks, save for where rats have stirred and displaced them; there is no trace of blood to be found, and neither Daken nor Laura are forensic experts.

Laura is carefully shifting through trays, finding little other than dusty knives and tools. There is distaste written all over her features as she moves them aside with gloved hands, searching for anything that might qualify as evidence. She’s spent more time in places like these than she cares to think on. Being back in this environment – in the midst of the bland silver surgical steel, of the tables with their restraints, of the hateful blades and probes – makes bile rise in her throat. She swallows it down, and it burns, but she keeps going for the sake of the mission – for the sake of stopping this possible Weapon X revival before it properly takes root again.

No, she can handle the physical environment. What she is struggling with right now are the scents in the room.

They don’t make any sense.

One moment, Laura is sure she catches a distinguishable human scent beneath the faint smell of disinfectant, but, just as she’s committing the scent to memory, she loses it, finds herself scrambling for it once more. Sometimes she thinks she recognises a scent, and desperately tries to make the connection before it dissipates. She is met with consistent failure.

It’s so strange a phenomenon that Laura can’t help but suspect that Daken has something to do with it.

“Daken?” she calls.

“Mm?” Daken is across the room, rifling through cupboards and failing, similarly, to find anything noteworthy. Laura crosses the room, eyeing a steel table with disgust as she moves to stand beside her sibling.

“You aren’t using your pheromones, are you?”

“What?” he looks up at her reproachfully. “No. You know I don’t use them around you, unless they’re benign.”

“They trigger accidentally sometimes, though,” Laura points out. “You say this place is familiar… you are sure your pheromones aren’t being activated unconsciously due to an emotional response?”

Daken looks outright offended at the suggestion. “Laura, are you suggesting I spent the better part of a few decades simultaneously fine tuning my pheromone usage and undergoing daily trauma, only to be totally overwhelmed by being back in a place I was tortured in maybe… once? Twice, max?”

“I am saying that you lose control over your pheromones in Sarah’s presence quite regularly now. Perhaps it is slipping into other situations?”

“It’s a different thing entirely with Sarah,” Daken grumbles. “That’s more-“ -he almost says instinctual, but cuts himself off, because ew, he is not a slave to any weird, familial bonds, thank you very much- “-anxiety based.”

“Are you certain?” Laura presses. “You had a… funny spell before we came in.”

“I just zoned out, that’s all,” he mutters, embarrassed that she noticed his brief shut down when he’d made eye contact with Shark-Woman. “Look, I can’t get a read on any of the scents either – not for lack of trying. Seems to me that whoever was here last suspected that they might have feral mutants come looking for them in the event of an information leak.”

Before Laura can respond, her communicator beeps, and Prodigy’s urgent voice crackles through the speaker above a din of shouts and growls.

“Under attack at the West Wing,” he yells. “Requesting back-up-“

The message stops abruptly. Daken and Laura share a quick glance, then race out of the labs in the direction of the conflict.

*

 Whoever was using this place last has left dozens of dogs roaming free in the cells. The survivors are the biggest, nastiest specimens, if the smaller, rotting corpses around them are anything to go by – a dozen or so robust mongrels with scars and shaved patches which suggest they were subjected to experimentation.

The mutts are not friendly.

By the time Daken and Laura reach the room, the dogs numbers have halved. Logan and Iara have monopolised the fight, tearing through the dogs as well as they can with claws and teeth, though Eyeman and Prodigy are good shots, their bullets finding their marks and sending the animals sprawling.

“They’re augmented!” Prodigy yells as Daken and Laura join the fight. “Their skin’s been toughened. Attack eyes and joints! Aim to cripple and then kill!”

 The skirmish goes on far longer than Daken would’ve expected; the dogs aren’t just tough, they’re fast and reactive, too, and he finds he’s having to back off and evade more than he’d ideally like to avoid getting wounded. The last thing he needs is for his healing factor to play up in front of anyone here.

Laura is much more hands-on. She plunges claws through eyes, and points where the skin has weakened. These aren’t pleasant kills; Laura hates to kill anything so innocent, something that never would’ve chosen such a fate for itself, but it is a necessary evil. Mercy killing, even.

“Wow, Logan,” Daken says as Logan slices the head off the last of the dogs, taking advantage of a weak point. “What a clean kill. But don’t you have to step back and ask yourself ‘why did I grant the mutt a quick death when I could’ve drowned it in an inch of water?’”

Logan throws him a hurt look.

“Enough, Daken,” Laura says sternly, and Daken returns to her side with a nasty smirk on his face.

“Can’t smell anything for the blood,” Shark-Woman growls, stooped on the floor, clawed hands pressed to the sides of her head. She alone had torn through the dogs like they were nothing, her jaws crushing through bone, teeth severing limbs and ripping apart toughened skin and muscle - it was only her preoccupation with thoroughly shredding every dog she got her claws on that stopped her from singlehandedly killing every one. Everyone present is covered in gore, but she, in particular, is soaked with it. “Is everybody okay?”

There are affirmative responses from everyone present.

“Good,” she says. She’s trembling, Daken notices, and her hands keep clenching and unclenching - having trouble controlling her shark instincts around this much blood, he supposes, though she is doing admirably. “Knew it couldn’t all be easy. Has anyone found any evidence?”

The answer is a resounding ‘no’.

“Dammit,” Iara mutters, shaking her head as if to clear it. “According to the floor plan, the computer room’s a little way on from here. Daken, do you know how to use the computers? Passwords and whatever?”

“I do.”

“Good. Prodigy, Daken and X-23, move on to the computer room. Wolverine, Eyeboy, I want you two to go back to the experimentation rooms and check for any evidence that might’ve been missed first time ‘round. I’ll return to the documentation rooms to do the same. Keep in contact via communicators, as usual. Go.”

*

“It’s trashed.”

The computer room is in ruin - screens torn from walls, machinery bent and twisted, wires severed and snaking uselessly around the floor.

“Will any of it be salvageable?” Daken asks Prodigy, though he knows the answer before the man gives it.

“No,” Prodigy kicks some broken glass aside and sighs. “Whoever was here last didn’t want anyone to find out what they’d been up to.”

“Their foresight served them well, then.”

Away from Prodigy and Daken, Laura moves between the broken machines. There are recent scents in the room, but, just like the ones around the rest of the building, they aren’t right. Sometimes, Laura thinks she recognises one or another, but then it changes – distorts, almost – and becomes infuriatingly unknowable once more.

“I’ll alert the others,” Prodigy says, activating his communicator. Daken acknowledges him with a grunt and skulks over to Laura, who has taken to pacing by the door.

“Who do you suspect?” Laura asks without stopping. Daken wonders if she’s aware that she’s scratching up and down one forearm hard with her nails.

“It’s like you said - it could be any number of people,” Daken says noncommittally, reaching out to carefully take her arm. She stops and nearly shakes his hand off of her, but then she looks down and sees the angry red lines on her forearm before the healing factor magics them away. Laura takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “What about you?”

“I have been thinking about it,” she says. “And it looked like Colcord’s work in the videos.” Her voice is edged with something unspoken.

“Colcord is dead,” Daken lies, the same way he did all those years ago on Madripoor. “So it certainly isn’t him.”

Laura looks at him hard, but Daken’s well-practiced poker face doesn’t slip.

 “We’re regrouping by the entrance,” Prodigy calls.

The tense moment between the siblings is broken, and they leave the room with David, in a silence that isn’t entirely comfortable.

*

“This was a damn waste of time,” Shark-Woman seethes. The motley crew of mutants are outside the facility, back in the biting Russian cold, and they’ve got nothing to show for their expedition inside, save for some mangled dog carcasses. “Whoever it was using this place, they knew we were coming. Hell, I’m willing to bet the dogs in there weren’t the same ones being vivisected in the videos we got sent – they wouldn’t leave that sort of evidence around if they’d cleaned everything else up so thoroughly.”

“Yes, well,” Daken yawns and stretches dramatically. “As _enjoyable_ as it’s been being an X-Man for the day, I’d like to get back to real life now. So if we’re quite finished –“

“You go when I say you can go,” Shark-Woman rounds on Daken, makes a subtle motion for Eyeman to join her. “Just what is your deal with this place anyway? What the hell was so important that you had to come and have a look?” She advances into Daken’s space, looming with her hands raised in anticipation of a violent reaction. Daken looks at her cooly, spares a glance at Eyeman, who is stood a way off, obviously trying to analyse him.

_No points for subtlety,_ he thinks. _Pheromones it is, then._

An unpleasant sense of unease settles in Laura’s stomach; one part of her urges her to step in and have any questioning along these lines done in a less emotionally fraught situation, whilst another reminds her that Daken is plenty old enough to fight his own battles, and that some comeuppance for his earlier antagonising of Iara wouldn’t be wholly undeserved.

Laura knows that Logan is experiencing a similar conflict. In truth, he wants nothing more than to order Iara to back off – but Daken has done nothing but snarl and spit at him all day, so he knows any coddling would be met with a vicious response.

“I’m offended, Shark-Woman,” Daken says. His tone is light, and it infuriates Iara. She turns violently to look at Eyeman, enquiring for any information he might’ve picked up, but he looks as if he’s miles  away, suddenly heady and woozy. “Not only do you doubt my integrity in taking time out of my busy schedule – and I _am_ busy – to come here and assist with the exploration of this place, you set your lackeys to try and psychoanalyse me. I’m afraid that doesn’t sit well with me.”

“What the hell have you done to him?” Shark-Woman snarls, motioning to Eyeman, who looks as if he’s about to fall asleep standing up. She takes another step forward and Daken’s expression falters. The pheromones _should_ be having a similar effect on her as they are on Eyeman, and yet, her aggression levels seem only to have increased.

_I hate working with animals,_ he thinks. Unfortunately, the thought shows on his face in the form of a slight nose wrinkle, and that throws Shark-Woman over the edge.

Prodigy is fairly certain he’s the only one present with a shred of sense left at this point. He watches Iara launch herself at Daken, flooring him before he has the chance to block or evade. Wolverine and X-23 rush in, Logan tackling Iara with enough force that she is knocked off of Daken - her aggression levels are not so easily moved, and she redirects onto Logan, slashing and clamping down on one of shoulders with staggering force. On the floor, Laura helps Daken into a sit; his face is cut and bleeding from one of Iara’s swipes, but he’s otherwise miraculously unharmed.

Poor Trevor is still in a daze, still so affected by Daken’s pheromones earlier that he hasn’t even reacted to the carnage.

Logan is bleeding profusely, and Laura snarls ‘stay there’ to Daken before she joins the fight, taking over from Logan, who backs down to catch his breath. Daken looks at him with a glimmer of satisfaction in his eyes.

Laura is avoiding taking any damage herself, but she clearly has no idea how to stop Iara; the wereshark mutant is in full rage mode, slashing and snapping with all the illogical violence of an animal. Prodigy knows it’s going to take either wearing her out or a good knock to the head to snap her out of it – so, with a put-upon sigh, David joins the fray.

“David, what are you doing?” Laura bites out as David joins her. She blocks a heavy swipe in her direction. “You will get hurt.”

“Honestly,” David rolls his eyes, effortlessly dodging a punch from Iara. “What is it with you people and forgetting how many skills I’ve got? I might not be a mutant anymore, but,” he moves into a fighting stance, dancing up and down on the balls of his feet and sidestepping another strike as Laura moves off and goes to attack from the rear. “What knowledge I _did_ absorb gets a lot of use. Laura, jump on her back and get a hold of her fin, I want to get her on the floor so we can bring her back.”

Daken watches interestedly as Laura does as instructed, and Prodigy drops to the ground in a swift, agile motion, kicks to sweep Iara’s feet from under her. David Alleyne isn’t someone Daken’s ever really considered before – just someone he knew of, but didn’t assume to be worth the time due to his being depowered – but now, watching the man work, his curiosity is piqued. There’s grace in his movement, assuredness in his technique, and he’s certainly not bad-looking.

_Always room for people like him on my taskforce,_ Daken thinks as he watches he and Laura restrain Iara, whose struggles are slowly subsiding. They’re joined by Eyeman, who seems, finally, to have recovered from the pheromone assault.

“Hey.”

Daken turns to look at his father and grimaces unpleasantly.

“What?” he snaps.

Logan flinches slightly. As satisfying as it is to see Wolverine covered in his own blood, Daken’s disappointed that his father’s healing factor seems to be in full working order and that his wounds are knitting themselves back together swiftly.

“Jus’ wanted to check you were okay,” Logan says. Daken scoffs, then snarls and smacks his father’s hand away when he reaches for his face.

“<What the hell do you think you’re doing?>” he snaps, reverting to Japanese. “<Don’t touch me.>”

“<Sorry,>” Logan says gruffly, retracting his hand quickly, wincing when Daken moves to put distance between them. “<It’s just… yer still bleeding pretty bad, kid.>”

A fleeting look of dismay comes over Daken’s face, and he runs a hand over his chin. Sure enough, when he pulls it back, there’s blood marking the fabric there.

“<Are you alright?>” Logan asks tentatively when Daken scowls and digs the tips of a couple of fingers into one of the open wounds, apparently testing the depth of the cut.

“<Oh, fuck off, ‘dad’,>” Daken spits, turning sharply and taking off at a run in the opposite direction of the facility. Logan looks after him in dumb bewilderment.

Laura looks up from where she’s helping Iara – now reverted to her human form – get her bearings.

“You gonna go after him?” David asks. “Think me and Trevor are alright helping Iara if you want to.”

Laura considers it for a moment.

“No,” she says. “No. I will talk to him later about… this.”

She’s not sure what she expected from Daken on this mission, but she can’t help being disappointed with him, nonetheless.

*

“I think you owe me an explanation.”

Colcord’s dealt with difficult people before. He built his entire career dealing with some of the nastiest scum the world had to offer, _experimenting_ on some of the most temperamental people he’d ever met to create magnificent – if unpredictable – living weapons.

He’d been good at it. Even in a cutthroat industry like his, he’d held his ground and survived.

Daken Akihiro ruined all that.

The clone bitch had helped, of course, but Daken had chosen to keep him alive, to chain him up and lock him in a dingy apartment in an impoverished Madripoor neighbourhood. His body had never fully recovered from the explosion – the healing factor serum he’d used on himself had been faulty, not nearly complete, and failed to put his body back together properly. Nowadays, Colcord is a mess of scar tissue, in a state of dull but constant pain.

Such an existence might’ve broken a weaker man – so many years spent in solitary confinement has certainly done a number on Colcord’s mind, he won’t deny that – but he remains resolute, assured of his eventual escape. His prospects brightened unexpectedly a couple of years ago, when Daken had appeared out of nowhere to order him to renew work on the healing factor serum. Colcord had agreed, of course; even if he was being forced to work remotely, still stuck in the apartment with screens and communications set up so that he could communicate with the scientists in the Russian facility, it was better than nothing. He doesn’t trust Daken to keep to his word, but he is in the process of getting bargaining chips together; Wolverine’s spawn isn’t going to get one up on him again.

Daken is, unfortunately, a temperamental boss, and, in the wake of the recent leak, he’s only become worse.

He’s stormed into the apartment, clearly in no good mood, crossing the floor and cornering Colcord on his chair in front of the monitors. He hems the human in, snatches Colcord’s throat with one hand and grips hard.

“Who leaked the footage?” Daken’s voice is terrifyingly soft.

“I don’t know,” Colcord hisses. The hand around his throat tightens. “I don’t know!”

“I don’t believe you,” Daken says, and the claws slide out on his free hand. He trails the backs of them slowly down his victim’s chest. “Do you know the trouble this has caused me, Colcord? The population in Madripoor is growing at an exponential rate thanks to the mutant-friendly legislation I recently instated. What I _should_ be doing is ensuring that the economical viability of the island grows with the population, so that the boom in immigration doesn’t cripple my bank account and ruin Madripoor. What I _have_ been doing is chasing around a bunch of X-Men, trying to make sure no one finds out that I’m at the heart of this – and, painful though it is to admit, I don’t think I did a very good job.”

“I’ll get you your healing serum,” Colcord wheezes. “I don’t know who leaked the information, I swear it, but you’re going to have a hard time finding anyone else with my sort of knowledge on the sly – especially now that people are suspicious.”

“Hm. The worst part is, I suspect you’re right.”

Daken moves away, relinquishing his grip on Colcord’s throat. Colcord splutters, but leans his head back nonetheless, relieved.

“The new facility is better,” Daken says, idly prodding at some messily stacked files on a bookshelf. “There’s little chance of anyone finding it unless they know what they’re after. I’ll continue to supply you with animals and criminals to work on –“

“The serum would come much easier if you’d bring me mutants with healing factors to experiment on-“

“Out of the question,” Daken snaps. “You work with what I give you, and you _will_ give me results.”

“How nice that you’ve grown a conscience,” Colcord mocks. Daken glowers at him and runs a finger along the edge of a claw. Colcord snaps his mouth shut.

“It has nothing to do with having a conscience,” Daken says. “Mutants are rarer than humans – mutants with healing factors, even more so. After this fiasco, I’m not going to do anything that might attract the attention of the powers that be. On the other hand, I can give you all the worthless human scum you could ever need.”

Daken approaches Colcord again, grabs the scarred flesh of his chin and tilts his head up so their eyes meet.

“I am being _very_ generous, Colcord. When you give me a flawless serum, you gain your freedom _and_ those coveted Weapon X files I went out of my way to steal. Who knows? If you make anything worth a damn with them, I might even be interested in doing business with you in future.”

Colcord scowls, jerks away.

“You’ll have your healing factor back in a matter of years,” he promises.

“That’s a good boy,” Daken gives him a patronising pat on the head. “But, just in case you _were_ involved with that information leak…”

In a blinding motion, Daken seizes the back of Colcord’s neck with one hand and slams the claws of the other through the man’s abdomen. Colcord screams, and Daken smiles, cruelly twisting his claws in the man’s intestines.

“If something like this happens again,” Daken says, delighting in the scumbag’s sobs and pleas for mercy. “This is what you can look forward to for the rest of your pitiful life. And trust me, Colcord,” Daken pulls his hand free with a vicious upward slice, droplets of blood following the movement of his claws. “You’ll live through every minute of it, even with a healing factor as rudimentary as yours.”

Daken wipes his hand and claws clean on Colcord’s shoulder as the man doubles over, cursing and sobbing weakly. The mutant stretches indulgently, the unique satisfaction that comes with hurting someone weaker settling over him, and crosses the dingy room to leave.

Outside, the night air is cool, refreshing. Daken locks the door to Colcord’s apartment, heads off in the direction of one of his favourite Madripoor properties in anticipation of a good sleep – or maybe a quick fuck with some pretty thing he picks up off the street, and _then_ a good sleep. But when he heads down the stairwell and reaches the dank street, his skin prickles and he’s gripped with a cold, familiar dread.

Something… someone is watching him from the shadows.

Daken stops. His breath quickens.

Could it be-?

There’s no scent, but _he_ can do that, _he_ can mask his scent…

No. It can’t be. He can’t _want_ it to be.

Still…

“Who’s there?” he says, and where he’d hoped there’d be a sense of authority, there is only a slight waver.

Something shifts in the darkness of the alley to his right.

A sick sort of nostalgia washes over Daken, makes him nauseous with simultaneous fear and hope, and spurs him to ask: “Master?”

His question is met by a hacking cough, and a hobo stumbles out of the alley.

“Master, ey?” he says. “Think I like the sound o’ that.”

Daken’s embarrassment is tempered by conflicting relief and disappointment, and he backhands the homeless man as he passes him, sending him sprawling to the ground.

_Definitely need to sleep_ , Daken tells himself, though he can’t shake the feeling that there was something behind the sudden bout of paranoia.

He won’t dwell on it – and as he moves down the street, he thinks of Laura, and hopes that, if and when she next contacts him, she won’t be too angry at him for his actions during the latter half of the X-Force mission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter turned out to be at least twice as long as I thought it was going to be. @_@ Had to shoehorn in some shameless appearances from some favourite minor X-characters of mine (Shark-Woman and Eyeman actually appeared together on-panel in 'WatXM' #42, I was very excited), just couldn't help myself.
> 
> Next time: uhhhh Johnny Storm returns to the story?? Cut me some slack, it's like, 5am here. :P


End file.
